In my work, I seek to create spaces where creativity can come to life, expand, and be reimagined in conversation with others.
At the heart of my composition is an invitation to co-create. In my opera-theater pieces, audiences imagine mythical and ancient stories alongside performers, who shape them freely, guided by the unique flexibility of my scores. In my Blueprints — a new kind of score offering frameworks for interpretation and creation — performers bring the music to life with their own voice, making it a vibrant, evolving work.
Cultivating Feedback, a practice I co-developed, offers useful tools and techniques to harness feedback as fuel for success, helping us to elevate our work, strengthen our community, and rediscover joy on our creative journey.
Additionally, I bring the conversation online through YouTube and Instagram, offering both performance and education to a wider audience.
Grounded in curiosity, conversation, and community, my work thrives as a platform for others’ collaboration and creative expression.
“Among American composers of his generation, Garrett stands out because of the way he’s assimilated such diverse global musical and other artistic influences into a distinctive, original...sound. And he’s successfully created a strong collaborative process for making multimedia productions that may be a sustainable model for independent twenty-first-century American composers.”
–Brett Scott, Wall Street Journal critic
Composer Biography
Garrett Fisher is a composer, writer, pianist, filmmaker, and teacher. He grew up in Michigan and Maine, spending formative periods in Istanbul and London during his parents’ sabbaticals. After completing degrees in music composition and English at Oberlin College, he moved to Seattle, where he formed the Fisher Ensemble.
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Opera-Theater
Fisher combines elements from world musical traditions to create a signature East-meets-West style, offering a new lens for mythical and historical material. Since 1994, he has created over a dozen immersive, ritualistic opera-theater pieces inspired by Ancient forms such as Japanese Noh and Greek tragedy. His work, performed across the US and Europe, “has combined elements of opera, dance, Indian raga, Japanese Noh theater and more into fusions that have both a ritualistic intensity and an improvisatory freedom…a groundbreaking hybrid...a strong, unified and strikingly individual utterance of unambiguous beauty” (The New York Times).
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Major productions include KOCHO, produced by Beth Morrison Projects in New York City; YOSHINAKA, a collaboration with Tokyo-based Noh master Munenori Takeda; and BLOOD MOON, commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects/HERE Arts Center and premiered at the Prototype Festival (2020). Of Blood Moon, The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Fisher ingeniously transfigured the sound world of classical Japanese Noh drama."
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BLOOD MOON. Photo by Maria Baranova.
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CATHEDRAL WOODS will be released in Spring, 2025.
Creative Process
Fisher is known for his collaborative process, inviting input from performers and designers early in development. His use of “blueprints” — improvisatory frameworks for narrative and musical exploration — gives performers space for individual interpretation and demands deep trust and extensive practice. No two performances are ever the same. As he describes it, “when participants, directors, designers, performers, have a sense of ownership in the work, it makes the work better…Collaboration opens me up to different cultures and ways of thinking and I always feel changed and better for it” (International Examiner).
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Blueprints for Solo Piano
Recently, Fisher has expanded his exploration into the solo realm with BLUEPRINTS FOR SOLO PIANO, a 36-piece experimental series. Book 1: Winter premiered in Seattle’s Wayward Music Series (2021) and was hailed as “daring...A 45-minute suite of overwhelming textural richness, rhythmic freedom and sonic grandeur...the most immersive and beautiful new piano music I’d heard in years” (The Seattle Times).