Taylor Joshua Rankin is a filmmaker and composer of new music based in Los Angeles. His music exists within the trend of contemporary-classical composers who draw upon a depth of influences such as minimalism, Avant-rock, experimental, micropolyphony, and tintinnabulation, inside of and extending beyond the world of new music. Rankin’s joy in making music is to express a sort of emotional zenith with sounds of a dense and undulating world, existing in a space between gossamer and cacophony.
His music has been performed by ensembles across the U.S., such as the Grammy-winning ensemble Third Coast Percussion, The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Friction Quartet. Rankin’s recent short film The Snow Leopard, for which he wrote, directed, and scored the music, has won multiple awards and recently screened at the 24th Beverly Hills Film Festival. He also works in post-production as a creative video editor where his work has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and SF Chronicle, and has led to a Grammy nomination for the San Francisco Symphony.
While at MacDowell, Rankin worked on a multi-movement work for vocalists and electronics, pulling texts from both the Old Testament and science fiction, exploring the parallel narrative of an individual’s relationship to the cosmos within an existentially altering experience.
