Sarah Goldfeather

Violin & COmposer

Sarah Goldfeather is a composer-performer who lives in Jersey City. Her compositions include commissions from pianist Timo Andres, ETHEL quartet, a 25-minute song cycle she performed with Contemporaneous, and several works for her ensembles, Exceptet and Cipher. Future projects include works for Warp Trio and Alkemie. She received a 2023 Finalist award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Sarah co-writes and performs music for Goldfeather, an experimental pop band based out of New York City. The whimsical brainchild of Sarah Goldfeather and Mike Tierney, Goldfeather’s music has been described as “a nightmare funhouse-mirror take on Carly Rae Jepson-style upbeat pop [that is] deeply disconcerting and outrageously fun” (National Sawdust Log), with songs that are “as crazy as they are catchy... a three minute rush of conflicting emotions over sonic exploration... sounds from one universe seem to be leaking into another" (New Sounds), “giddy, cute, vulnerable, and delightful” (I Care If You Listen), “full of light and life” (The Current, Minnesota Public Radio), and "poignant...striking and laudable" (The Deli Magazine). Their fourth studio album, Change, was released in 2023 on innova (American Composers Foundation), and they were recently featured on New Sounds with John Schafer (WQXR).

Sarah has also had an active career as a violinist and singer. She was the violinist in the Tony Award-winning and Grammy-nominated Broadway production of Oklahoma! and the 2023 production of The Coast Starlight at Lincoln Center Theater, and has additionally performed as a soloist in for The NYU International Conference of the Arts in Berlin, the AMEE Festival in Madrid and Valencia, the TEDxMET series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has been a featured composer-performer for the WildShore Festival in Alaska, The Present Music Festival in Milwaukee, The Johnstone Fund for New Music in Columbus, OH, The Laudie D. Porter Artist Series at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, The Center for New Music in San Francisco, The MATA-Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Hall, and more. Sarah has additionally performed at The Barclay’s Center, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Alice Tully Hall, The Bang on a Can Marathon, The Park Avenue Armory, and with Courtney Love, Ronnie Spektor, Lizzo, Kimbra, to name a few. Her television performances include the 2019 Tony Awards, the Tonight Show, the Today Show, and Kelly and Ryan. Sarah is also a teaching artist for Musicambia, a music education program that works with incarcerated populations. Through Musicambia, she has co-taught songwriting workshops in Sing Sing and Lansing Prison Correctional Facility in Kansas, and works regularly as a teaching artist in both Sing Sing Correctional Facility and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.

In addition, Sarah is the co-founder and artistic director of Exceptet, an “eclectic” and “quirky” (New Yorker) seven-piece new music ensemble that commissions new works from emerging composers including recent Barlow Prize Winner Katie Balch. Sarah is also the co-founder and violinist of Cipher, a soprano-violin duo with Justine Aronson.

Beyond her music career, Sarah moonlights as an English Professor in the Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark. She enjoys puns and has worn mismatched socks for almost 30 years.