Dr. Anne Guzzo

Anne Marie Guzzo is an internationally performed composer and the founder of New Frontiers Festival of contemporary music based in Laramie, Wyoming. Passionate about new music, Guzzo performs regularly and teaches composition and theory at the University of Wyoming. Research interests include the music of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Shulamit Ran, the cartoon music of Carl W. Stalling, silent movie music, and musical absurdism.

Guzzo’s music was recently performed in London by the AdZel Duo (Mariam Adam of Imani Winds and Stephanie Zelnick of the University of Kansas/Boulder Philharmonic clarinets) and in Los Angeles by the Synchromy collective with performers Iryna Krechkovsky Loucks, violin; Colleen Sugata, viola; and Ross Gassworth, cello.  Guzzo was a 2012 Fall Artists Resident at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming, and her works were heard in 2012 in Goianiâ, Brazil played by the Orquestra Musicâmera de Goiás with Joaquim Jayme, conductor, and Diego Caetano, piano soloist at the Festival Internacional Música Clássica no Coração do Brasil as well as at the SESI Theatre’s International Women’s Day celebration in March, 2012 performed by Rubia Santos, piano, and Guzzo herself on clarinet. Anne was a 2011 Wyoming Arts Council Fellow, and a 2010 fellow at the Cortona Sessions for New Music in Cortona, Italy where her music was performed by DuoSolo (Mary Fukushima, flute, and Michael Kirkendoll, piano). Her compositions were also performed at the Made In Woman festival in Bologna, Italy in June 2010 in collaboration with Theatre Amoeba, an international theatre collaborative.

Compositions by Guzzo have been heard at numerous festivals, including the American Composers’ Forum New Music Salon in Minneapolis, the ArtPoint Festival in Frankfurt Germany, the International Cello Encounter in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium (OBFCS) performed by New York new music ensemble, Fireworks. Guzzo was the recipient of a Crumb Commission from the OBFCS for a new work that celebrated the 75th birthday of renowned composer, George Crumb.

Her music has been played by the Empyrean Ensemble in the San Francisco Bay Area; the Divan Consort in Los Angeles; Third Angle in Portland, Oregon; Telling Stories from Boulder/Denver Colorado; the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra in Wyoming; and a number of other ensembles.  

A native of Wyoming, Anne Guzzo earned her Ph.D. in theory and composition from the University of California, Davis, where she studied composition with Ross Bauer and Pablo Ortiz. Her master’s degree is in 20th Century Music from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she received a bachelor of music in clarinet performance from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.