ANOUSH POGOSSIAN
CLARINETIST

In 2020, Anoush was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, one of the nation’s highest honors for graduating high school students who exemplify artistic and academic excellence, leadership qualities, and a commitment to serving their communities. That same year, Anoush was awarded the Grand Prize of the Music Center’s “Spotlight” Competition in her hometown, Los Angeles (although, if you ask her, she's technically from Glendale...), and, in 2022, was selected as a finalist in Juilliard's Clarinet Concerto Competition as a sophomore in the Columbia-Juilliard exchange. Anoush has also had the privilege of receiving multiple Performing Arts Scholarships from the Armenian General Benevolent Union, and was recently chosen to perform in a recital representing AGBU at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, sharing traditional as well as contemporary music of Armenian culture.

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A committed advocate and pioneer of new music, Anoush was an artist at the YellowBarn Music Festival for the summer of 2023, and will return for the 2024 season, featuring composer in residence Jörg Widmann. In 2022, Anoush was the clarinet fellow at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and, enticed by contemporary music and collaborating with composers for several years now, previously spent four summers in YellowBarn's Young Artists Program, where she had the opportunity of bringing multiple premieres of her peers’ to life each year. Anoush also served as a member of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra, and joined the orchestra on their 2019 tour of Europe and the United States under the baton of Sir Antonio Pappano, performing as Principal Clarinet in Richard Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie. She has also participated in festivals and concert series including the Sebago-Long Lake Music Festival, VivaViola!, Dilijan Chamber Music Series, and Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music.

 

Anoush also regularly performs and volunteers with Music for Food, an initiative to raise resources and awareness for food insecurity in our local communities, through the organization's New York City and Los Angeles chapters. Raised in a family of professional musicians, they perform together often at MFF events, and, during the lockdown, organized online concerts supporting organizations including MFF and The Midnight Mission.

 

Anoush is currently pursuing her Masters Degree at The Juilliard School as a Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellow under the tutelage of Alan R. Kay, with whom she studied while completing her undergraduate studies in Psychology at Columbia University through the Columbia/Juilliard five-year B.A./M.M. program. Previously, she studied with Michael Yoshimi at the Colburn Community School of Performing Arts, where she was a member of the Ed and Mari Edelman Honors Chamber Music Institute, and also previously studied with Michele Zukovsky. 

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At Juilliard, Anoush is a recipient of a Morse Teaching Artist Fellowship through through the Office of Community Engagement, a ​​mentorship through which she works weekly with K-12 schools in NYC. She currently teaches general music at the P.S. 303Q "The Academy of Excellence in the Arts" elementary school (Queens, NY), and was previously a fellow at The Heschel Middle School (Manhattan, NY). She also regularly teaches as a substitute in the Music Advancement Program, an initiative run by The Juilliard School to bring tuition-free music education to students from communities historically underrepresented in the classical music field.

 

Through her studies in neuroscience and psychology at Columbia, Anoush is interested in examining mechanisms of perception and cognitive science-- particularly as they relate to music processing and education, and with a special interest in regards to accessibility of classical music institutions for neurodiverse students. Since fall 2022, she has worked as a research assistant in the Shohamy Learning Lab at Columbia’s Zuckerman “Mind, Brain, and Behavior” Institute.

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