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Bobby Ge is one of eight Resident Composers selected to participate in the 2025 Mizzou International Composers Festival. MICF Resident Ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform his composition You Are a Topological Donut at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, at Columbia’s Missouri Theatre. The concert is free and open to the public.
Ge is an American-born, Shanghai-raised composer and media artist whose work engages with themes of communication, home, and hybridity. Described as “expressive and gripping” [Financial Times] and “exciting, frenzied, unpredictable” [CityNews CBR], his work is filled with shimmering textures and restless motion, often undergirded by a wry sense of humor.
Winner of the Barlow Prize, Ge has completed a diverse array of projects including a sinfonietta/percussion ensemble piece for the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire, a saxophone concerto for the US Navy Band, a multimedia work for the icarus Quartet, and a song for soprano, ensemble, and electronics supported by New Music USA. The latter, premiered by Mind on Fire, received a 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award.
He is an avid collaborator and has had the good fortune of sharing his work with a growing list of presenters that ranges from the unorthodox – the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, NJ Audubon – to the cutting edge of new music, including Beth Morrison Projects, the Attacca Quartet, Khemia Ensemble, Tesla Quartet, Blackbox Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and Sō Percussion. His experimental short film You Have Entered the Public Domain has screened at film festivals including the Golden State Film Festival and the Short. Sweet. Film Festival. A dedicated educator, Ge believes firmly in the value of the arts as an expressive and uniting force, and he has collaborated with numerous educational ensembles including the New York Youth Symphony, the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Guangzhou Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Westside Chamber Players, and the St. Olaf Band.
He is currently pursuing his PhD at Princeton University, and holds degrees from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University [MM] and the University of California, Berkeley [BA]. His primary teachers include Donnacha Dennehy, Nathalie Joachim, Juri Seo, Dan Trueman, Tyondai Braxton, Kevin Puts, Harold Meltzer, and Cindy Cox.
We recently chatted with him via email.
What is your musical background? When and how did you begin composing?
Funnily enough, music became an important part of my life only after quitting classical lessons in middle school. I began volunteering as a church pianist instead, where I learned to play over changes, accompany choirs, and improvise in order to set a reflective, prayerful ambience. Looking back, I realize that those piano improvisations were some of my first attempts at composing, so even though I’ve moved on from church, those experiences continue to inform how I create music today. I started to write notated music a little later in high school, though none of that music was ever performed. I didn’t hear any of my notated music performed live until college, after I joined my school’s undergraduate composers club. Hard to go back to MIDI after that.
How did you hear about MICF?
MICF was actually one of the first music festivals I heard about! In 2018, during the first year of my master’s at Peabody, Alarm Will Sound actually came to perform a number of student works as well as some pieces previously written for them via MICF. I was blown away by the group’s incredible musicianship and also by how high quality the pieces written for them were, and so I made it a goal of mine to work with AWS one day. It took a little while before they felt the same way about me, though.
Tell us about your piece that will be performed at MICF. What should we listen for?
My piece is titled You Are a Topological Donut, and it’s about the apparently insatiable need to digitize anything and everything humans can think of, from ancient cave drawings to the human genome. The initial spark of inspiration came when I learned that many first-time users of Blender, a popular and free animation software, begin by learning to animate a donut. It occurred to me that there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of digital donuts floating in the cloud, and it got me thinking about how superficially exciting yet fundamentally empty the digital realm is (like a donut!). Everything there is a signpost pointing to something in the real world, and yet it feels as though we spend more and more time interacting with these signposts instead of their physical counterparts. I thought it would be fun to satirize this rather dark trend via the platitudinous stylings of meditative therapyspeak videos – and, of course, donuts. Musically, I drew primarily on breakcore and meditation drone music. The fun part was trying to mesh them together.
What does it mean for you to work with an ensemble like Alarm Will Sound?
As I noted earlier, I’ve dreamt of working with AWS for a long time now! They’re kind of the perfect new music ensemble – virtuosic, omnivorous, and collaborative. I’ve gotten to hear a number of their concerts over the years, and I have always been truly amazed at their incredible skill and dedication to championing new, daring work. I hope this won’t be the only time I get to work with them!
What do you hope to learn from your MICF experience?
This is only the second time I’ve really tried writing a piece for ensemble and live video, so I’m mostly excited to see how it works out and to see how much further I can explore these ideas. I know a good number of the other composers selected this year have some multimedia experience, too, and I’m really excited to hear from them and learn about what other strategies there are to approaching visual elements in our work!
For more information on Bobby Ge, visit his website.