Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans.
He grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta,
and studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts,
the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University.
He has received grants and prizes from ASCAP, Yaddo,
The New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, New Music Delaware, the Eastman School of Music and Syracuse University.
He has also been awarded the Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award from Composers Inc., in San Francisco, has been nominated for two prizes
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2005. In 2007 he was awarded the Roger Sessions Prize for an American composer by the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, and was in residence at Bogliasco in the spring of 2008.
His music has been commissioned and performed by the
Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Denver Symphony, the Syracuse Symphony, the Winnipeg Symphony, the Academy of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, the Cassatt, Corigliano, Miro, and Degas Quartets, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the California EAR Unit, pianist Gloria Cheng, violist Melia Watras, 'cellist Robert Burkhart, flutist Mario Caroli, the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic of Zlin, Czech Republic, Sequitur, the Empyrean Ensemble, Buglisi-Foreman Dance, the Athabasca Trio, CELLO, Flexible Music, and Ensemble Nordlys, of Denmark, and Ensemble Accroche Note, of France.
He has two CD’s on CRI, both now available on the New World label, and can also be heard on the Vienna Modern Masters Music From Six Continents series. In addition to his concert works, Waggoner has also composed extensively for theatre and for film, and is an active violinist. He was a founding Director of the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music in Vinalhaven, Maine,
and is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Setnor School of Music of Syracuse University, teaching regularly also at NOCCA Riverfront in New Orleans. With his wife, the ‘cellist Caroline Stinson, he has recently formed Open End, which gave its premiere concert in 2005 at the Tenri Center in New York, and has since performed in New York, Syracuse, New Orleans, and Strasbourg, France.
