About Fracesca Gaza

Francesca Gaza is a composer, singer and pianist working across new music, jazz, songwriting, and early music. Her work unfolds between composition and song, drawing on historical instruments, voice, and experimental sound practices, and is often informed by close engagement with literature, poetry, and human histories. Moving fluidly between these worlds, she treats music as a space where different temporalities, textures, and languages can coexist and resonate.

Her artistic practice develops along two intertwined paths: her song-driven work, heard in her albums Lilac for People (2019) and Sfiorire (2022) now continued in her quartet aminth; and her compositional work with the ensemble Kugelförmigkeit, conceived as a laboratory for unusual instrumentations, timbral exploration, and hybrid aesthetics. Her upcoming release Crown Shyness extends this approach, tracing fragile architectures of sound shaped by early music, contemporary composition, and improvisation.

A sought-after composer with a growing body of commissions, her work includes Post Sappho, an extended cycle for choir and electronics composed for PourChoeur, and other works commissioned by ensembles such as Il Pomo d’Oro, Kambrass Quintet, Solothurner Singknaben, and Ensemble Proton Bern, with new works to be premiered in April 2026. She has been selected as an Emerging Artist at the International Young Composers & Conductors Academy (IYCA) 2026 in Ticino, where she will be writing for the Ensemble Intercontemporain. She is currently composing A Vague and Purple Hyacinth for Renaissance flute consort Hourglass, led by Liane Sadler, with whom she will also perform and premiere the work at the end of 2026; the work engages the poetry of Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa, creating a transtemporal dialogue between voice, text, and sound.

As a performer, she leads the ensemble Kugelförmigkeit and the quartet aminth, where the songwriting sensibility of her earlier work is reconfigured through experimental, folk, and Renaissance-informed sound worlds. Since 2024, she has been invited to regularly conduct the Basel Jazz Orchestra, extending her practice into large ensemble contexts, and has been invited to collaborate on cross-genre projects such as trumpeter Pascal Klewer’s Acoustic Ambient Ensemble and the Iago Fernández Large Ensemble.

Based between Basel and Florence, and born in Germany to an Italian mother and Romanian father, she moves between languages, traditions, and sonic worlds, shaping a practice that brings distant materials into close, fragile coexistence.

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