Photo Credit: Gary Payne
COMPOSER | VIOLINIST | VIOLIST | BAROQUE VIOLINIST
Los Angeles-based Andrew McIntosh is a Grammy-nominated violinist, violist, composer, and baroque violinist whose musical interests span historical performance practice, microtonal tuning systems, and the 20th-century avant-garde. He is a professor of violin, viola, and composition at the California Institute of the Arts, concertmaster of both Tesserae and Echoi, the resident ensemble of Monday Evening Concerts, and a founding member of Wild Up, the Formalist Quartet, and Wadada Leo Smith’s Red Koral Quartet.
His music often incorporates just intonation and re-tuning of instruments, spanning genres from instrumental concert music to opera, work with field recordings, and fixed media. In The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross has said, “McIntosh’s spare, rarefied sonorities, which tilt away from traditional tunings, give an air of mythic otherness,” and that he is “a composer preternaturally attuned to the landscapes and soundscapes of the West”. Composition highlights include works commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, Yarn/Wire, Wild Up, Calder Quartet, Industry Opera Company, LA Percussion Quartet, Piano Spheres, and violinists Ilya Gringolts and Movses Pogossian. His compositions have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Ojai Festival, Big Ears Festival, the Gaudeamus Festival, Time:Spans Festival, Moments Musicaux Aarau, Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemasse Muzik, Festival Aperto, Miller Theatre, National Sawdust, Issue Project Room, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tectonics Festival Glasgow. Portrait albums of his music have been released by KAIROS, Populist Records, and Another Timbre. About his 2022 album “Little Jimmy”, recorded by Yarn/Wire, Pitchfork described the album as “a meditation on a place that McIntosh loves, Little Jimmy is a quiet love letter to the ever-evolving reality of life on Earth.”
Performing modern repertoire is central to McIntosh’s practice. Recent performances include new large-scale chamber works by La Monte Young, Wadada Leo Smith, and Éliane Radigue/Carol Robinson. He has worked personally with composers including Christian Wolff, Sofia Gubaidulina, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Helmut Lachenmann, Raven Chacon, Harold Budd, Marc Sabat, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Sarah Davachi, Tom Johnson, and Jürg Frey. He was also the viola soloist in the U.S. premiere of Gèrard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques at REDCAT in 2010, for which his performance was praised by the LA Times as being “played with commanding beauty”. His recordings can be heard on labels including Another Timbre, Wandelweiser, KAIROS, New Amsterdam Records, Bridge, Innova, New World Records, TUM Records, Darla, and New Focus Records.
As a baroque violinist he is particularly recognized for his performances of the complete Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. About a 2025 performance of the cycle at the 92nd Street Y, the New York Times wrote that his interpretation was characterized by “exceptional clarity and rhetorical verve”, and an LA performance of the sonatas was included in The New Yorker as one of the most notable classical performances of 2023. He has also served as guest concertmaster for operas with LA Opera and Opera UCLA, and in 2023, he was both Music Director and Concertmaster for Long Beach Opera's all-Handel pastiche production of "The Feast", a collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company. With Tesserae, he has performed alongside renowned baroque musicians such as Rachel Podger, Christophe Rousset, and Stephen Stubbs. His recording of the sonatas for violin and fortepiano of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges with Steven Vanhauwaert was released in November 2023 on Olde Focus Records, and marked the first time these works had been recorded on period instruments.
COMPOSER | VIOLINIST | VIOLIST | BAROQUE VIOLINIST
Los Angeles-based Andrew McIntosh is a Grammy-nominated violinist, violist, composer, and baroque violinist whose musical interests span historical performance practice, microtonal tuning systems, and the 20th-century avant-garde. He is a professor of violin, viola, and composition at the California Institute of the Arts, concertmaster of both Tesserae and Echoi, the resident ensemble of Monday Evening Concerts, and a founding member of Wild Up, the Formalist Quartet, and Wadada Leo Smith’s Red Koral Quartet.
His music often incorporates just intonation and re-tuning of instruments, spanning genres from instrumental concert music to opera, work with field recordings, and fixed media. In The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross has said, “McIntosh’s spare, rarefied sonorities, which tilt away from traditional tunings, give an air of mythic otherness,” and that he is “a composer preternaturally attuned to the landscapes and soundscapes of the West”. Composition highlights include works commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, Yarn/Wire, Wild Up, Calder Quartet, Industry Opera Company, LA Percussion Quartet, Piano Spheres, and violinists Ilya Gringolts and Movses Pogossian. His compositions have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Ojai Festival, Big Ears Festival, the Gaudeamus Festival, Time:Spans Festival, Moments Musicaux Aarau, Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemasse Muzik, Festival Aperto, Miller Theatre, National Sawdust, Issue Project Room, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tectonics Festival Glasgow. Portrait albums of his music have been released by KAIROS, Populist Records, and Another Timbre. About his 2022 album “Little Jimmy”, recorded by Yarn/Wire, Pitchfork described the album as “a meditation on a place that McIntosh loves, Little Jimmy is a quiet love letter to the ever-evolving reality of life on Earth.”
Performing modern repertoire is central to McIntosh’s practice. Recent performances include new large-scale chamber works by La Monte Young, Wadada Leo Smith, and Éliane Radigue/Carol Robinson. He has worked personally with composers including Christian Wolff, Sofia Gubaidulina, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Helmut Lachenmann, Raven Chacon, Harold Budd, Marc Sabat, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Sarah Davachi, Tom Johnson, and Jürg Frey. He was also the viola soloist in the U.S. premiere of Gèrard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques at REDCAT in 2010, for which his performance was praised by the LA Times as being “played with commanding beauty”. His recordings can be heard on labels including Another Timbre, Wandelweiser, KAIROS, New Amsterdam Records, Bridge, Innova, New World Records, TUM Records, Darla, and New Focus Records.
As a baroque violinist he is particularly recognized for his performances of the complete Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. About a 2025 performance of the cycle at the 92nd Street Y, the New York Times wrote that his interpretation was characterized by “exceptional clarity and rhetorical verve”, and an LA performance of the sonatas was included in The New Yorker as one of the most notable classical performances of 2023. He has also served as guest concertmaster for operas with LA Opera and Opera UCLA, and in 2023, he was both Music Director and Concertmaster for Long Beach Opera's all-Handel pastiche production of "The Feast", a collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company. With Tesserae, he has performed alongside renowned baroque musicians such as Rachel Podger, Christophe Rousset, and Stephen Stubbs. His recording of the sonatas for violin and fortepiano of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges with Steven Vanhauwaert was released in November 2023 on Olde Focus Records, and marked the first time these works had been recorded on period instruments.