Ronit Kirchman
Ronit Kirchman is a composer, songwriter, music producer and multi-instrumental performer based in Los Angeles. Her compositions include film scores, concert works, songs, music for theater and dance, and audiovisual computer compositions and installations.
Ronit has scored many films which have been broadcast (IFC, Showtime) and screened around the world at prestigious festivals including Sundance, Tribeca and the IFP/LA Film Festival. She is also the recipient of many awards including the Sundance Composers Lab Fellowship, BMI Conductors Fellowship and a Subito grant from the American Composers Forum.
Ronit’s film work spans a wide variety of styles and approaches, from large-ensemble orchestral writing to innovative electric-acoustic hybrids and accessible songs. Recent film scores by Ronit include the independent comedy feature Pants On Fire (dir. Colin Campbell) and the powerful experimental feature The Golden Age Of Fish (dir. Kevin Everson). The Golden Age Of Fish had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2008.
Ronit was a featured performer and originated a workshop in free musical improvisation at Total Music Meeting in Berlin in November 2008. She is currently at work recording and producing an album of her songs for commercial release. She is also the founder and creative director of The Love Ensemble, a new integrated-music theater group whose members include Marc Doten, Motoko Honda and Kio Griffith.
Ronit’s theater scores include a chamber opera and productions at the Lincoln Center Theater Directors’ Lab, Target Margin Theater and Peculiar Works in New York City. She also has worked as a musical director and sound designer for various theatrical productions.
Many of Ronit’s compositions focus on the expansion and integration of musical vocabularies through the development of intuition and cognitive systems. Her concert works include Reparts, an orchestral piece which was premiered by the New Century Players of Los Angeles, and Departures, which pairs a jazz ensemble with live programmed computer instruments, using narrative from Casablanca and visual film elements as the framework for improvisation. Ronit’s video compositions have also been exhibited and performed at galleries and festivals across the U.S.
Ronit is a classically trained violinist who has always been drawn to innovation, experimentation and improvisation. She has performed in a wide variety of contexts, from Carnegie Hall to clubs, in experimental, classical, jazz, rock, blues and country groups. Her concert performance instruments include violin, voice, 7-string electric Viper, guitars and electronics. She routinely adds new instruments to her arsenal.
Ronit performs internationally and has played and recorded in the U.S., Canada and Europe with such notable artists as Nels Cline, Fred Frith, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Anne LeBaron, Bertram Turetzky, Wolfgang Fuchs, Torsten Müller, Pat Thomas, John Edwards, Philipp Wachsmann, Wadada Leo Smith, Adam Rudolph, Vinny Golia and the Golia Large Ensemble and alt-country band Hem among many others. Her discography includes work as a performer, producer and arranger, with currently available recordings on Dreamworks, Nine Winds, pfMentum, emr, Ruby Red, and Vitamin, for which she created orchestral versions of songs by Jane’s Addiction. More music from her catalog will be released soon.
Ronit is a visual artist, working in diverse media including painting, drawing, electronic media and video. She is also a poet and the author of two books: Humph!: The Book, a collection of satirical cartoons, and Staying True, a selection of her essays and poems on music process. Ronit holds degrees from Yale University (B.A., magna cum laude with distinction) and CalArts (M.F.A., Composition-New Media).
In recent years, Ronit has been further cultivating her interests in theater and consciousness practice, and in bridging the worlds of music and movement, dreams and waking. Her training includes creative dream work, Linklater voice technique, classical voice, hatha yoga, and other forms of creative meditation. She is currently training to certify as a Feldenkrais Practitioner at the Feldenkrais Institute of San Diego.
Ronit has always felt that music is far greater than the notes on the page and even the sounds of its fabric, and that it is essentially integrated with other forms of artistic expression at its source. She plays to activate and enliven the oral traditions, as well as the notated and computed musical traditions, which are cross-pollinating and generating new life in every moment.