Born in Oakland, CA, Anne Hege began her musical studies singing with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir and the Oakland Youth Chorus. Hege received a BA in music with honors from Wesleyan University, CT and an MA in music composition from Mills College, CA. In 2014, she completed her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University where she studied the role of the body in the creation of meaning in musical performance. Her research was guided by and has influenced her work as a vocalist, composer, and conductor.
Working as a choral conductor since 1999, Hege studied conducting with Melvin Strauss, Marika Kuzma, and Judit Hartyanyi, among others. She founded and directed the Folk3000 (1999), Albany Community Chorus (2000), Cuatro Vientos (2004), and Celestial Mechanics (2007). Currently, Hege is the artistic director of Voci Women’s Vocal Ensemble, director of Level IV of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, and conductor of the Holy Names University Chorus.
As a vocalist, Hege has performed regularly as a choral singer, small ensemble vocalist, and soloist. She has premiered new works by Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, Dmitri Tymoczko, Daniel Trueman, Matt Marble, and others. She often performs in her own works and in her projects with choreographer Carrie Ahern, video artist Harrison Owen, and pianist and performance artist Heather Heise.
Hege’s compositions have been recognized with awards such as The Elizabeth Mills Crothers Prize, The Gwen Livingston Pekora Prize in Music Composition, and a Mark Nelson Fellowship. She has composed for film, installation art, dance, and concert settings. Her works have been performed by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Ensemble Klang, NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, Flux Quartet, New York Virtuoso Singers, Princeton Chamber Singers, Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, Voce in Tempore, Carmina Escobar, and Jason Calloway, among others. She performs original works in her performance duo New Prosthetics, as well as in the laptop ensemble Sideband. Since 2008, Hege has composed musical scores for Carrie Ahern Dance. Hege’s participation in Ahern’s creative process enables her to write music that grows with the movement material, supporting the creation of an integral work. The New York Times praised her score for Ahern’s SenSate as “convincing” and “strangely environmental.” Influenced by her deep listening practice, her latest compositions lie somewhere between ritual, music, and theater with some homemade instruments thrown in for good measure.
