Dog Star Orchestra 20th Festival
June 20-30, 2024

About The Dog Star Orchestra:

THE DOG STAR ORCHESTRA is an ensemble and a once-a-year festival of experimental music, started in 2005 by Michael Pisaro as a way of presenting recent experimental music by young composers and classic pieces from the experimental tradition. Described as “messily exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times, Dog Star events happen throughout the Los Angeles area and often feature offbeat performances in out-of-the-way places, alongside more traditional concert settings. The Dog Star Festival is one of the main presenters fostering and documenting the singular Los Angeles experimental music scene, as well as presenting work that would otherwise not be heard in the US.

The festival has  featured the US premieres of many works by the international artists, including the Wandelweiser collective,  and presented seminal pieces from the American origins of the experimental school (Cage, Wolff, Feldman, Lucier, Oliveros, Tenney and more). Initially curated by Pisaro alone, the summer festival grew from six concerts to up to fifteen concerts annually. Beginning in 2011 the festival began to employ multiple curators drawn from people who had participated in previous years. In most years, as many as 60 musicians participate as composers and performers. The audience for the series has also grown exponentially over the twenty years of Dog Star's existence.