Laura Brackney

Laura Brackney is a composer and sound artist based in Texas. She views composing as a form of sonic gardening, cultivating each work’s interrelationships and sounds as ecosystemic material. Recently, her practice is most concerned with exploring timbral, textural, and temporal extremes and liminalities. 

Her work has been commissioned by the Mayo Clinic, the Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, the Bullock Texas State History Museum, the New Media Art and Sound Summit, the Portland Youth Philharmonic, and Collide Arts, among others. Brackney’s work has been premiered at the Subtropics Festival, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium, the 78th Anniversary of the UT Kniker Carillon, the Look and Listen Festival by Grit Collaborative + Oh My Ears, and has been performed by groups such as the AURORA trio, Gamelan Lipi Awan, and Quince Ensemble. In 2020, her string quartet Desertification won 1st Prize in the Mykytyn Distinguished Composition Award. In 2021-2022, Brackney served as the Composer-in-Residence for the Arizona State University Wind Ensemble. In addition to traditional concert music, she has created music for theater, film, fixed media, and bicycle installations. 

She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition at Arizona State University, her Master of Music in Composition at Texas State University, her BM in Theory and Composition at Southwestern University, and previously served as the Co-Creative Director of COTFG, an arts nonprofit dedicated to diversifying Austin’s sonic ecosystem.