Cassia Streb is a composer, sound artist, and curator who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She creates music and sound art that engages audiences by responding to specific situations and locations, for people who are seeking a connection with the world that surrounds them and who are open to hearing and seeing a familiar space through a new lens. Her pieces are often composed for friends and colleagues in order to highlight aspects of their musicality that she admires.

Cassia is active in the field of contemporary and experimental music, performs regularly as a solo violist and a chamber musician, and collaborates with a variety of artists from many disciplines. Cassia plays viola, small percussion instruments and found objects in her work with improvisation and interpretation of notated scores.

Cassia began as a classically trained violist, but after she earned her Master's of Fine Arts in the Multi-Focus String Performance Program at the CalArts in 2006, where she studied with James Tenney, Michael Pisaro, Vinny Golia, and Mark Menzies, and after that she shifted her work into more experimental sound traditions and she began composing.

Cassia has composed works for ensembles such as the Isaura Quartet, Story Water, the Arroyo Ensemble, and the Dog Star Orchestra. More recently she has been collaborating with poet Mark Yackich in the creation of a large work for reader, orchestra and meditators. Earlier she worked with writer Stephen Osborne to create The Coincidence Problem, a work for choir and chamber ensemble where audience members are able to customise their own experience by streaming pre- recorded readings while walking through the live installation. 

Cassia has collaborated with Thadeus Reed on sound installations that have been featured in the New Town Arts festival (Los Angeles) , the Sea ‘n Space Showcase (Los Angeles) and the Memory Festival (Vancouver, Canada). These installations use analog electronics and recorded sounds that invite the audience to interact with the work without forcing their participation. More recently, in collaboration with Tim Feeney, she has created sound installation “hybrids” that involve creating audio fields through a multiple-speaker array and then performing live within these sound spaces. These works have been performed in a cemetery, an industrial stairwell, an outdoor amphitheatre, and outside the Joshua Tree National Monument. 

Cassia also collaborates with filmmakers, theatre directors and choreographers to create music and sound design. A recent project was Sound House, a modular, interactive sound and puppet piece created with puppeteer Janie Geiser, co-composer John Eagle and video designer Hsuan-Kuang Heish. 

Cassia is a founding member of the Southland Ensemble, a contemporary chamber ensemble that is dedicated to the interpretation and performance of experimental music, as well as the Koan Quartet, a string quartet performing works by living composers. She is also a member of Tasting Menu, an improvising trio that uses found objects and small toy instruments. 

Cassia is a sought-after soloist who is known for her interpretation of modern scores and microtonal works, and she collaborates with many artists from the fields of electronic music, western classical instruments and other world music traditions. She has also commissioned and performed a number of works by both established and emerging composers and she has worked closely with a range of artists including Christian Wolff, James Tenney, Michael Pisaro, Jurg Frey, Mark Trayle, and Catherine Lamb. 

As a curator, Cassia curates a monthly series at Automata, a theatre in Los Angeles, where she presents shows and installations that require improvisation, special acoustic treatment or audience experience. She is also the Artistic DIrector of the Dog Star Orchestra which is a two-week summer festival in Los Angeles. The 20-year-old festival is committed to creating opportunities for independent, experimental, and non-commercial artists to present their work. Cassia is also the co-founder of Music for Your Inbox, an innovative hybrid virtual and in-person experimental sound film and visual art subscription series that removes barriers to access by delivering art directly to audiences via email and surface mail. 

Cassia’s solo album, Marginal Habitats (2023), can be found on The Unsilent Desert Press, and her other recordings, with her string quartet and in other chamber ensembles, are on Suppedaneum Music, Infrequent Seams, Full Spectrum Records, Extradition, MAPPA Editions, and Ninewinds Records. 

Cassia has given educational talks and guest lectures on music composition, improvisation, and the process of artistic collaboration at the California Institute of the Arts, the University of British Columbia, Depaw University, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Irvine.