Ian Gottlieb is a Los Angeles-based composer and cellist who is deeply curious about the world and passionate about creating evocative music that explores the breadth of the human experience. Known for moving freely through many genres, Ian draws from a kaleidoscope of musical experiences including playing classical and contemporary music at Yale School of Music, jamming samba in the streets of São Paulo, and touring China with experimental rock band Invisible Anatomy. As a film composer, his original music has been featured on Netflix, Disney+, and MGM+, on productions including Chef’s Table and The Witcher. His concert works, written for everything from niche folk instruments to full orchestra, have been performed by Grammy-winning and nominated ensembles and artists including Palaver Strings, Sandbox Percussion, Hilary Summers, and Rhonda Rider, with support from The World Music Institute, New York State Council for the Arts, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and ASCAP.
Ian collaborates with artists of all different walks of life, touring and performing his music everywhere from Sundays Live at LACMA’s Bing Theatre to (Le) Poisson Rouge in NYC and the Beijing Modern Music Festival.
He co-leads cello ensemble Splntrd Wood, which creates fresh and invigorating live music experiences that cross divides between musical genres. The ensemble crafts its own audacious arrangements, deconstructing any type of music—from Brazilian folk to the symphonic orchestral canon—and presenting it anew through the inimitable and versatile sound of the cello. In 2020, the ensemble released its first album, De Lá Pra Cá. Inspired by Gottlieb’s Fulbright fellowship to São Paulo, Brazil, the program features samba, bossa, forró, choro, and tango music from across the American continent. Most recently in 2024, they toured and recorded Ian’s debut original album, Theory of Change, a post-classical meditation on the constantly shifting experience of life. Written for 6 cellos in a unique alternative tuning, the album explores notions of change and flow with ethereal and minimalistic music like slow waves building to ecstatic moments.
Other projects include we who keep the scream as an inviolable secret composed for Brazilian painter Regina Parra on her exhibition, Pagan, which showcased in 2022-2023 at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo, Brazil and the Galeria Jacqueline Martins in Brussels, Belgium. Part installation recording and part live performance with costumes by designer Marina Dalgalarrondo, the work sets to music the untranslatable laments from Sophocles’ tragedy, Electra, with haunting melodies written for female singers and synth.
Forever, My Grace, a 36 minute work for percussion group arx duo, is based on an imaginary folk tale in which a monarch asks a variety of philosophers to define the infinite; each movement offers a different conception of forever. Premiered during the pandemic, arx’s video performance was presented online by New Muse Concerts and later by Town Music Series as a part of artistic director Joshua Roman’s residency for Town Hall Seattle, and is now available on YouTube.
In 2018 Ian toured with string orchestra Palaver Strings throughout the Northeast and Southern California, leading educational workshops and presenting A Voice in the Crowd, a program centered around Ian’s composition, The River is Everywhere, a 37 minute concerto grosso which explores each musician's capacity to simultaneously have their own unique voice and be part of a larger tapestry of sound. Working with community music programs Bridge Boston, LA’s Harmony Project, Santa Clarita Valley Youth Orchestra, and San Diego Youth Symphony, students were invited to share the stage with Palaver and to co-compose with Gottlieb a second musical piece to open the program. They presented at Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, ME and the EXPO Center in downtown Los Angeles, among others, releasing an album later that year. Ian also contributed to Palaver’s 2025 Grammy nominated album, A Change Is Gonna Come, with his arrangement of Harry Burleigh’s Lovely Dark and Lonely One with vocals by tenor Nicholas Phan.
Ian also co-leads Invisible Anatomy (IA), an “avant-rock ensemble [that] combines the theatricality of performance art with the drama of jazz and classical music, creating haunting songs of danger [and] intimacy” (Second Inversion). The group’s debut album Dissections, released via New Amsterdam Records, was named one of Second Inversion’s best albums of 2018.
Beyond composing, Ian has had the privilege of doing orchestration, score preparation, and music preparation on major blockbuster films, TV shows, and live concerts, having worked for and learned from hollywood luminaries including Thomas Newman, Joseph Trapanese, Michael Giacchino, and the Walt Disney Music Library team on well known productions such as Pixar’s Elemental, Spiderman: Far From Home, Glass Onion, Netflix’s The Witcher, National Geographic’s America The Beautiful, Encanto Live at the Hollywood Bowl, and Of Mice And Men with the Joffrey Ballet. His work on the Witcher in particular represents a culmination of Ian’s experience in all the different roles of producing a score, where he is the orchestrator and music contractor, writes some additional music, and records the cello solos from his home studio on his gut strings cello, which he designed to emulate historical performance.
As a cellist, Ian is an avid performer of music both new and old, having performed with orchestral, chamber, and contemporary ensembles including Debut Orchestra and American Youth Symphony under the baton of John Williams and David Newman, Contemporaneous, and Heartbeat Opera, in venues such as Boston Symphony Hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and National Sawdust. He has participated in masterclasses and intensive chamber music seminars with Pieter Wispelwey, the Muir String Quartet, and the Vermeer String Quartet. Ian has also worked with numerous pop artists, including recording cello for Mike Shinoda and Mike Posner and touring with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Air Traffic Controller at major venues such as the House of Blues (Los Angeles), the Coliseum (Hampton, VA), Mohegan Sun (CT), and the Verizon Arena (NH).
Ian is deeply committed to collaborative engagement in local communities, teaching young musicians and finding innovative presentation formats for classical music beyond the concert hall. He has taught composition and cello at the Yale Music Department, The Kaufman Music Center's Special Music School, Music In Schools Initiative, Bridge Boston Charter School, GYBSO Intensive Community Project (ICP), Harmony Project, and Renaissance Arts Academy, and has organized events such as the Bach to Funk charity concert series in Boston, the Song Mural Project in New Haven, a public arts initiative inviting the community to draw a mural of song in chalk in public spaces, and FUNHOUSE in NYC, an immersive presentation of art installations and performances.
A Los Angeles native, Gottlieb studied classical and jazz cello at the Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences. He holds a B.M. in Theory and Composition and Cello Performance from Boston University, Magna Cum Laude, where he studied with the late Marc Johnson, and an M.M. in composition from The Yale School of Music, where he studied with Pultizer-Prize winning composers David Lang and Aaron Jay Kernis and Tony-award winning composer Jeanine Tesori. He’s done additional studies at the Royal College of Music in London and UCLA’s film scoring program. In 2017 Ian completed a 9-month residency in São Paulo, Brazil under the auspices of a Fulbright Scholarship, studying and performing Brazilian music and collaborating with local artists dedicated to finding new cultural contexts for traditional Afro-Brazilian instruments. On his spare time, Ian grows food in his backyard, cooks nourishing meals, and disappears into the wilderness whenever he can — a pastime he considers vital to his creative process.