Karl Ronneburg

Percussion

Karl Ronneburg is a composer, percussionist, and multimedia/performance artist from the Seattle area. In addition to frequently performing his own music, his work has also been played by chamber musicians, bell towers, rock bands, orchestras, arcade machines, and people dressed in squirrel costume, among others.

As an interdisciplinary performer, Karl played the role of the Dictator in the revival of Meredith Monk’s “Quarry” and co-starred in a complete adaptation of Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” for his living room, which Nico Muhly called “bonkers insane brilliant”. This led to Karl co-founding Fifth Wall Performing Arts, with which he directed and conducted Grey Grant’s opera “Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region” in Fall 2019. He is also a co-founder of the Glassbox Collective, which presented its premiere concert with members of the 2018 Lincoln Center Theater Directors’ Lab at Carnegie Hall.

As a composer, Karl’s music has been performed at National Sawdust, Pianos NYC, Ann Arbor’s Canterbury House and Hill Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, the New York German Consulate General, the New York Czech National Hall, the University of Michigan’s Biological Research Station, Spectrum NYC, the Pop-up Bach Store, MilkBoy ArtHouse, the Bushwick Public House, the Clarice Center for the Performing Arts, WCBN Radio, and Seattle’s Experience Music Project.

In addition, he has performed as a percussionist with Elliot Cole, Tanner Porter, New Music Detroit, the Bellingham Festival Orchestra, Carnegie Hall’s LinkUp Orchestra, the Cantori Choir, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States, and the National Orchestral Institute—in such venues as St Luke’s in the Fields, Dixon Place, Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms, the Mariinsky Theater, the Kennedy Center, the Gerald W. Lynch Theater, Alice Tully Hall, Detroit’s Symphony Hall, and South Africa’s Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival.

Karl received his undergraduate degree in Percussion from the University of Michigan and his master’s degree in Composition from the Mannes College of Music at the New School, studying with Missy Mazzoli. He now lives with his twin brother in New York City.