Experience the Magic of Music
Henryk Golden
artist, composer, tubist
Music
About me
Composition
Henryk Golden, who also goes by Harry, is a German-American Composer based in L.A and Vienna. He is fascinated by playing with the magic of music.
He studied composition in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, The Hague and Birmingham
with Ted Hearne, Richard Ayres and Andrew Hamilton. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall, Orgelpark and across Europe and the U.S. by renowned performers such as the Ensemble Multilaterale, New European
Ensemble, Bergamot Quartet, Ensemble Fractales, Residentie Orkest and etc. He prefers colloborating intensely with performers on his works and mutually developing a deep understanding of the music that is presented to the audience. He has extensive experience working with electronics, individual players, ensembles, orchestras as well as theater and dance. The composer Howard Skempton describes his music as "New Complexity Pop".
Arrangement
Henryk works as a music editor and arranger for hire. This work is grounded through his extensive composition experience, as well as through his experience as a music editor for established composers such as Ted Hearne.
He is fluent in arranging for different styles of ensembles and orchestras having a Classical and Jazz music background. He currently studies Jazz Composition with Vince Mendoza at USC. Through his composition experience and collaboration with performers throughout his life he understands the practicalities of performance for performers of different levels. Please contact me through the website if you would like me to join a project or receive a quote.
Performance
Henryk performs tuba, bass trumpet as well as speaking voice, electronics and conducting. He studied tuba with Jon Sass and Doug Tornquist in Vienna and LA and has performed for a number of years with the Names ensemble in Amsterdam led by Koen Nutters.
He has experience performing classical, contemporary, improvisation and jazz music. He partook in a masterclass with Vijay Iyer on improvisation in 2025. In 2025 he performed on the bass trumpet in Carnegie Hall. In collaboration with the tuba or by itself he also uses electronics either through the use of MAX/MSP, supercollider or through various uses of speakers creating spatialization or feedback. He studied electronic music at the Institute of Sonology with Richard Barrett and Bjarni Gunnarsson. He has developed his own speaking voice practice and is currently studying voice, as a tenor, with Irene Kurka. Further, he conducts New Music, having experience in Amsterdam and the UK and studied previouly with Larry Livingston.
Teaching and Technical Support
Henryk is a passionate educator and facilitator. He works since 2024 at the Creative Music Intensive led by Michael Harrison and Elliot Cole and visited by Vijay Iyer and Aleksandra Vrebalov at Arts, Letters and Numbers in Averill Park, New York as the Technical Director and as a faculty member.
He hugely enjoys supporting the participants at the Intensive in their technical needs, as well as teaching his own class on performance history and using genre as material. His teaching philosophy predicates itself on giving students the tools to explore their own creative needs. Further he works as a grader for musicology at the University of Southern California for Rotem Gilbert, as well as a Audio/Visual assistant at the University. He works freelance too as a live audio engineer and has studied audio engineering in the Hague with Paul Jeukendrup. He teaches private composition, musicology, theory, tutoring and brass instrumental lessons. Please contact him if you wish to take lessons with him. He offers flexible pricing and times. He also offers English-German translations of musicology texts.
Videos
Sprechen Sie Musik? - Henryk Golden
Ein gelassener Blick workshop performance by the HEX vocal ensemble in November 2024 I am hugely fascinated by history, because very much like music, it is so much about the change of things over time. Of course, I cannot and did not listen to the passage of time beyond the scope of my wherewithal and my lifetime, and even within that scope I only have the memory of listening. Nonetheless, I am very much able to listen to the here and now which is the result of everything beyond everything within the here and now. The composition of this piece is making a synthesis of the here and now and the history beyond it. I chose this specific speech and this specific moment in history, as I cannot help but realize that I am a product of this moment. Willy Brandt spoke in 1970, as chancellor of the Federal German Republic, in Warsaw, as the first elected German since the 2nd World War. 25 years after the end of this War, Willy Brandt was in Warsaw and 24 years later my German mother immigrated to Warsaw, where I was born 4 year later. Because Willy Brandt signed this contract and reached out to the east, as well as acknowledged the reality of the German crimes, the world that I grew up came to be. I do not exist separately from that moment. Because people decided to resolve issues and makes things better that world was created. But, sadly also not if it were not for the horrors that occurred before this moment. I think it is essential not to see this event and the development of the relationship of these two countries as progress but as a decided action. One cannot hear progress over time, only change. Time itself does not progress. This is a choice by two people and two governments to make life better for those who come after them.
an Emotional piece of music Performed, and premiered, on the 19th of November 2020 by Ricardo Oliveira in the Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, as part of the composition competition of the TROMP international percussion competition. Written from May 2019 to November 2020. Originally written in cooperation with and motivated by Iris van den Bos. The piece derived from a growing urge of mine to write music that is influenced by my emotions. This conflicted with my fundamental principle of leaving emotions and sentimentally behind when composing. Yet I was compelled not to do so based on concerts I had visited at the time, specifically one featuring Rebecca Saunders’ work and another featuring the work and performance of the Punk Jazz Fusion quartet Robocobra. I was fascinated and, perhaps to be more direct, irritated that this talented Punk Jazz Fusion band took so many more risks and leaps than the contemporary music composer. I wanted to have risk. I wanted to take leaps. Thus, as I received the offer from the percussionist, who played a piece in the aforementioned concert featuring the music of Rebecca Saunders, to play a piece of mine, I decided to write a piece that takes those emotions of vigor and naïve frivolousness and uses them. Yet in this piece, I do not react to these emotions. I use their elements, such as their rhythm, quality of sound and even the nature of their movement to create a sonic (and performance) world that features development driven by emotions and emotions driven by development.