"Kati Agocs’s music is blessedly unsophisticated in any conventional way … Instead, it has heart; it reaches the hearer through melody, drama, and clear design. Even a brief recent duet I and Thou, with its soulful directness, and its naturalness of dissonance, reveals much about the composer’s address to the listener."

-Citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Charles Ives Fellowship, May 2008

Composer Kati Agócs (kuh-tee ah-goch) was born 1975 in Windsor, Canada, of Hungarian and American background. Bridging the gap between lapidary rigor and sensuous lyricism, her music has been hailed as original, daring and from the heart. Recently appointed to the composition faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston, she is fast gaining international recognition as a significant voice of the younger generation.

Recent commissions include the Albany Symphony Orchestra (Albany, New York), American Composers Orchestra, Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, saxophonist Timothy McAllister, pianist Fredrik Ullén, New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, New Juilliard Ensemble, CBC Radio, Canada Council for the Arts, and The Juilliard School (for its annual Irene Diamond Concert).

Awards include a 2008 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2007 Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center, a Fulbright Fellowship at the Ferenc Liszt Academy in Budapest, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the United States Department of Education, a Presser Foundation Award, and honors from ASCAP in their Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Fellowships and residencies include the Dartington International Music Festival (Dartington, U.K.), the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (Yale Summer School of Music), the Aspen Music Festival, and the Virginia Arts Festival. On two separate occasions while attending Juilliard, Kati Agócs had her orchestral works premiered by The Juilliard Symphony in Alice Tully Hall as a winner of the annual Composer’s Competition. In 2004, she spearheaded a groundbreaking exchange program between Juilliard and the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary, that still continues today.

Kati Agócs holds the Doctor of Musical Arts and Masters degrees from The Juilliard School. She is also an alumna of the Aspen Music School, Tanglewood Music Festival, Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (one of the United World Colleges), and Sarah Lawrence College, all of which she attended on full scholarship. Her principal composition teachers are Milton Babbitt, Robert Beaser, and George Tsontakis; she also worked with Zoltán Jeney during her Fulbright year in Budapest, and with John Harbison and Michael Gandolfi at Tanglewood. She considers Roger Sessions to be her “grand-teacher,” since three of the composers with whom she has studied (George Tsontakis, John Harbison, and Milton Babbitt) were his students. She is based in New York, and has a composition studio in the fishing village of Flatrock, near St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.