Sospeso performed Anne LeBaron's work Devil in the Belfry at the Whitney Museum at the start of the 2001-2002 season.

Anne LeBaron is recognized for her work in the electronic, instrumental, and performance realms. Her compositions embrace an extraordinary array of subjects, ranging from contemporary adaptations of Greek and South American myths, to probes into extinction (both physical and cultural), to unheralded women in history. As a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 1980 - 81, LeBaron studied with György Ligeti, later completing her doctorate in composition at Columbia University. Her works have been written for virtually every contemporary genre and performed and broadcast throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, with performances in Stuttgart, London, Prague, Talloires, Hong Kong, Sydney, Berlin, Havana, and Kyoto. Her orchestral works have been conducted by Leonard Slatkin, Jorge Mester, and William McLaughlin. Awards and prizes include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a three-year residency in Washington D.C. sponsored by Meet the Composer, and the 1996 CalArts / Alpert Award in the Arts, along with assorted fellowships from the D.C Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Pennsylvania State Council on the Arts. She was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in the summer of 2001, where she completed Sauger, for trombone and processed vacuum cleaner sonorities. She currently teaches composition and related subjects at the California Institute of the Arts.

Pope Joan (2000), a dance opera jointly commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and Dance Alloy, was her latest dramatic musical work. Another recent large-scale work, Traces of Mississippi, is featured as part of a PBS documentary, currently airing. Commissioned by the Continental Harmony project of the American Composers Forum, it was written for the Tougaloo Chamber College Choir, joined by an orchestra, a gospel singer, rap artists, poet/narrators, and children's choir. LeBaron conducted the premiere in November, 2000. She is presently writing a one-act absurdist opera with the playwright Edward DeGrazia, The Vacuum Cleaner.

The range of LeBaron's musical language can be heard on several recordings devoted to her music. The Musical Railism of Anne LeBaron, a Tellus/Mode co-production, includes the first work written for the Lyon & Healy Electric Harp, as well as selections from her blues opera collaboration with Thulani Davis, The E. & O. Line. Rana, Ritual, and Revelations, with the New Music Consort and the Theater Chamber Players of Kennedy Center, highlights works from the 1980's. This recording received the highest rating given by Down Beat. Sacred Theory of the Earth, released on CRI in 2001, features instrumental works from the 1990's performed by the Atlanta Chamber Players. 

An accomplished harpist, LeBaron is renowned for her pioneering methods of developing extended techniques and electronic enhancements for the harp. She performed Solar Music, her work for flute and harp, in Prague at the 1999 World Harp Congress, where she also presented a lecture/demonstration describing notations for her original harp techniques. Leading innovators of jazz and other forms of improvised music, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey, have engaged her in performance and recording collaborations.

Biography courtesy of Anne LeBaron.