The Los Angeles new-music community lost one of its own when Sarah Gibson, pianist, composer, and educator, died of colon cancer on July 14 at the age of 38. A musical force since her early 20s, Gibson was set to have a new work, beyond the beyond, performed at this year’s BBC Proms in August but became too ill to finish the piece.
In its place, on Aug. 8, the BBC Philharmonic is scheduled to play Gibson’s 2021 orchestral work warp & weft, with the world premiere of beyond the beyond, in a version completed by composer and pianist Thomas Kotcheff, scheduled for a BBC-sponsored concert in 2025. A friend and longtime colleague, Kotcheff was half of HOCKET, the piano duo that he and Gibson founded in 2014 and that was hailed by The New Yorker as an “adventurous young ensemble.”
Born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1986, Gibson began studying piano at age 7. As a teenager, she was the pianist and principal keyboardist of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. Studying piano and composition at Indiana University (she graduated in 2008), Gibson went to earn master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Southern California, where she met Kotcheff.
HOCKET premiered over 100 chamber and solo works and made appearances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Noon to Midnight festival, Eighth Blackbird’s Creative Lab, and the Other Minds Festival, among many other performances. As HOCKET, Gibson and Kotcheff joined the acclaimed Los Angeles concert series Piano Spheres as core artists in 2019. The organization is dedicating its upcoming season to Gibson.
As a composer, Gibson held a Copland House Residency and received commissions from, among others, the League of American Orchestras, the Toulmin Foundation, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Tanglewood Music Center. Her Left-Hand Piano Concerto took first place in USC’s New Music for Orchestra competition.
In 2022, Gibson was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras to compose to make this mountain taller, which was premiered by the Sarasota Orchestra. Additional performances by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and Lansing Symphony Orchestra followed; the Idaho State-Civic Symphony is scheduled to perform the work on Sept. 27.
Fellow composer Andrew Norman told The Washington Post that Gibson — who is survived by her husband, Aaron Fullerton; their young son; and her parents and brother — “was creating powerful, personal music. … We are left with a beautifully crafted and deeply felt body of work that will live on.”
