Joseph Bourdeau is a composer, educator and performer currently based in Los Angeles, California. Influenced by diverse artistic interests, Joseph’s work blends music, humor and theater, while often manipulating familiar sounds and situations in the pursuit of surreal new experiences.
Active in a number of capacities Joseph has worked in mediums ranging from notated concert and theater music, to electroacoustic work, media installations, and free improvisation. His concert works have been presented across the U.S and abroad, with performances in Greece, Italy, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates. His recent theatrical piece This Way Forever was presented by In^Set during their residency at the 2024 Winter Composers Festival in Austin Texas, and his 2019 electroacoustic work The Imaginary Concerto was toured across the U.S. by pianist Mari Kawamura as part of her New Virtuosities series. In 2018, Joseph wrote, recorded, and mixed songs for a production of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children, at the Mandell Weiss Theatre in La Jolla, and in 2019 premiered his own half-hour long monodrama Songs from Patmos: Music for the End of the World.
Recently, Joseph presented the multimedia installation, A Couple of Things I Saw A Few Times, with collaborator Anqi Liu, as a part of Working Title, presented by Project [BLANK] in San Diego, California. He has also performed several times as a percussionist and vocalist in Project [BLANK]'s "Salty Series", held at various venues in the San Diego area. Joseph has given spoken at events like the Collide New-Music Festival in Orlando Florida, and the Festival de Música Nueva Ensenada, where he gave concerts and workshops on performing with found objects and text in 2023. Joseph appears as a percussionist on several records with the University of South Florida Percussion Group on Ravello Records.
Joseph holds bachelor’s degrees in Music Education and Composition from the University of South Florida, where he studied with Baljinder Sekhon. He earned his M.A, and PhD degrees in composition from UC San Diego, where he studied primarily with Natacha Diels, Wilfrido Terrazas and Michelle Lou.