Tonia Ko is a composer who is interested in the relationship between found objects and musical instruments. Her most recent work Her, Land Expanded was premiered by American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and features video design by Alexandra Cuesta, who she met during a 2018 stay at MacDowell. She is currently based in the U.K. and is lecturer in composition at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Her music has been performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Disney Concert Hall, Tanglewood, Aspen, and Santa Fe Chamber Music festivals. She has collaborated with leading soloists and ensembles including New Morse Code, Volti, Spektral Quartet, New York Youth Symphony, and Wild Up.
Tonia has received recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two BMI awards, and residencies at the Copland House, Djerassi, and Pocantico Center. She also served as the 2015-2017 Composer-in-Residence for Young Concert Artists. She received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and was the 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago's Center for Contemporary Composition. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Honolulu, Tonia earned a D.M.A. from Cornell University, with previous degrees from Eastman School of Music and Indiana University.
At MacDowell in 2018, she worked on Plain, Air, a 30-minute work for string quartet and electronics to be premiered by the Grammy-nominated Spektral Quartet. During her 2024 residency, Ko completed an arrangement of her bubble wrap concerto Breath, Contained III to be performed by the Luxembourg Philharmonic with the composer as soloist. She also began a new work for the Hamburg-based Non-Piano Ensemble, commissioned by Mutual Publishing. The piece is inspired by the lost kingdom of Hawai'i and its last queen Lili'uokalani, a nod to the shared background of Tonia and Jennifer Hymer, the festival's artistic director.
