Nicolee Kuester, horn

Brooklyn-based horn player, writer, and multi-disciplinary performer Nicolee Kuester divides her time between experimental music and classical playing, recently performing with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, The Knights, Illinoise on Broadway, and the New York Pops in NYC; Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris; Alarm Will Sound in St Louis; and the San Diego Symphony and Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestras in CA.

She is co-founder of MEANINGLESS WORK, an absurdist performance series that happily meanders between sounds, performance art, text, and movement theater. (Recent shows include an immersive corporate onboarding with mandatory atonal HR singalong, and an evening-length meditation on consumption and advertising that opened with Nicolee, heavily pregnant with canned goods, giving birth to a dinner for four.)

Her creative text/sound work has been published in the anthology Amor Forense: Birds in Shorts City and in the online journal littletell, and has been performed in venues from Tijuana to New Hampshire to London to north of the Norwegian Arctic Circle.

Aesthetic interests include tuning systems, works that unfold slowly over a long period of time, bewilderment, and the sound of conversation.

Nicolee holds undergraduate degrees in horn performance and creative writing from Oberlin College & Conservatory and graduate degrees in contemporary music performance from UC San Diego. From 2016-2018 she was the horn fellow with Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, and has spent many summers immersed in chamber music at the Marlboro, Yellow Barn, and Lucerne Music Festivals.