Annie Blythe is an American multi-genre cellist, composer, and ceramic artist working at the intersection of classical, contemporary, and electronic performance. Widely recognized for her virtuosic command of the instrument, her playing has been described as “dramatic and haunting” {the Austin Statesman), “spirited, precise, and full of energy” (The Durango Herald) and “Badass”(audience member). She began playing the cello at age 3 and made her solo debut with The New World Symphony at the age 8, conducted by Micheal Tilson Thomas. As a child she earned numerous statewide performance awards and appeared in several television commercials, an assortment of staged theater productions, and was featured on The Gordon Elliot Talk Show in a segment on “child prodigies”.
Blythe was a founding member of the Aiana String Quartet from 2005-2012 and has participated in prestigious String Quartet Residency programs at San Diego State University, The University of Texas at Austin, and Banff Center for the Arts. As fellows at the 2011 Aspen Institute for Advanced Quartet Studies the Aiana worked closely with members of the Takács, American, Calder, Emerson, Cleveland and Juilliard Quartets, and performed on several faculty concerts. The Aiana SQ was awarded the Barstow Strings Prize at the Coleman International Chamber Music Competition in 2011 and was the featured string quartet at the 2011 International Clarinet Convention where they were invited to perform with several artists including Ricardo Morales and Joaquin Valdepeñas, principal clarinetists of the New York Philharmonic and Toronto Orchestras respectively. The Aiana SQ was featured on the Naxos NonClassical Showcase event at the 2012 South by Southwest Music Festival.
Blythe has performed extensively as a solo, orchestral, and chamber musician across four continents, performing classical repertoire and premiering several contemporary, electronic, and multi-genre works in concert spaces ranging from the Crypt at Greenwood Cemetery to Le Poussoin Rouge, Ferst Center for the Arts, Cornish Playhouse, Texas A & M University, La Mama Experimental Theatre, The Knitting Room NYC, National Sawdust, The Beacon Theatre, United Palace, The Kennedy Center, Weil Recital Hall, and David Geffen Hall among others. In 2008, Ms. Blythe gave the world premier of Thomas Sleeper’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium.
Also an experienced educator Blythe frequently participates in performances and collaborations that aim to inspire and connect with youth across the globe. Contributing to the accessibility of music education as a tool for healing and connection is at the foundation of Blythe’s practice as an artist and she has given numerous public demonstrations ranging in topics from “Instrument Families” to “Storytelling Through Music” to “Looping and Improvisation for All Ages”. The Aiana SQ worked with children at Texas NeuroRehab Center to produce an immersive show featuring students' visual and literary responses to the music of Béla Bartók. The Aiana SQ also served as guest artists at the Canyon Crest Academy and SDSU in San Diego, CA. Other past outreach projects with the Aiana SQ include a tour of Tijuana, Mexico in partnership with Mainly Mozart, during which the quartet brought the music of Beethoven, Bartók, Mozart and Brahms to hundreds of children in ten low-income elementary schools. Additionally, Blythe has taught privately at the Los Angeles Music and Art School, Cascade School of Music in Oregon, Bantam Music in NYC, and helped organize and instruct a Beginning Strings Program in Southern California public schools via the Santa Barbara Symphony. Blythe has been a featured artist with New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program, The Little Orchestra, Fair Trade Chamber Music Society, and was invited to present a class on processing live electronics to kids — most under the age of 10 — at the Penacook Community Center in 2017. From 2015-2018, Blythe curated an outreach based concert series called Love Every Note aimed at forming connections within the community and raising additional resources for current global issues through curated genre-bending performances. The concert series presented artists on a rotating basis including, but not limited to, pianist Daniel Epstein, violinist Todd Reynolds, RighteousGIRLS (Gina Izzo, flute + Erika Dohi, piano), and dancers/choreographers Ashley Robicheaux and Mitchell Christie.
An advocate for contemporary music, and for re imagining the full landscape of the instrument, she performs frequently as a composer/improviser and in collaboration with other artists, creating performances that integrate and are inspired by elements of classical, metal, contemporary, and electronic music. In 2015 selections from her solo cello works were featured on the public composers forum “Call & Response” at The Tank in Manhattan and that same year she was commissioned by dancer/choroeographer Andrea Murillo to write ‘Remedios’, a piece for cello + dance inspired by the iconic novel 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Remedios was premiered at The Green Building in NYC. Blythe has also written several site specific works for electronics and was commissioned by NCP in 2016 to write ‘Item 8’ for a gala honouring composer Paola Prestini at Le Poussin Rouge.
Annie Blythe is currently a cellist for Lincoln Center Stage, a substitute with The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and is a highly sought after freelance artist. She regularly appears live and in recording with popular musical artists such as Ricky Martin, Streetlight Manifesto, H.E.R, Kenny G, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, Naturi Naughton, Tina Burner, Patti LaBelle, Yoko Shimomura, and John Legend, has performed and recorded for the Latin Grammy Awards and BET Awards respectively, and in 2019 recorded ‘See You Again’ by Wiz Khalifa for Steinway & Sons’ Music & Vision series. She has held positions with The Phoenix Symphony, The Nouveau Classical Project, and The Aiana String Quartet, and has performed and recorded selectively with Metamorphosis Orchestra, Mimesis Ensemble, Rhymes With Opera, Invisible Anatomy, Opera Hispanica, and Metro Chamber Orchestra.
Upcoming highlights include a collaboration with composer/guitarist Brendon-Randall-Myers to create a new album-length piece for solo cello with electronics, the launch of ‘Bloom’, a documentation based project culminating in a complete discography of the six cello suites by J.S. Bach, and the album release of Maurice Ravel’s Duo Sonate for violin + cello, recorded with former Aiana SQ first violinist Roseminna Watson. Blythe’s playing can be heard throughout the album ‘Corte’ by Trevor Gureckis, released in 2019 by Supertrain Records.
In 2018, Blythe opened Flowerface Ceramics, a tiny batch production company of vessels and objects for friends and others. In 2019, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she taught pottery wheel and hand building classes to all ages at a community studio in Brooklyn. Working with clay has informed the development of several of Blythe’s upcoming multi-genre projects and some of her ceramic work appears in the homes of world renown musicians such as Hans Jorgen-Jensen and Minna Chung.
Annie has studied with cellists David Cole, David Geber, Alan Stepansky, and Joshua Gindele and proudly performs on a modern instrument named Bodekai, that was crafted in Florence, Italy by John Terry. She holds a BM in Cello Performance and a MM in Orchestral Performance from the Manhattan School of Music.