Inés Thiebaut (b. 1979) is a composer and sound designer born and raised in Madrid, Spain. She spent several summers of her youth making music in the woods of Traverse City, Michigan, and those summers led to her move to the United States in her early twenties. After living in Boston, Brooklyn, and Salt Lake City, she settled in the East Bay of San Francisco, where she is Associate Professor of Music at California State University East Bay. Her music is influenced by Greek philosophy, postmodernism, new complexity, and the timbres of early analog synthesis.
Her chamber music has been performed in the US by the MIVOS Quartet, TRANSIT New Music, Ensemble MISE-EN, and The Cadillac Moon Ensemble, among others. In Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and Austria it has been performed by percussionist Miquel Bernat (ICTUS Ensemble), cellist Iracema de Andrade, the Galan Trio, and Tambuco Percussion Ensemble.
Recent works for the concert hall include apeiron (2025), for large ensemble and fixed electronics, commissioned by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition for its Grossman Ensemble. They also include syneche (2024), for piano, violin, cello, and fixed electronics, commissioned by the Greek Galan Trio and released on Neuma Records on the trio's album KINESIS, Vol. 3, and panta rhei (2022), for piano and fixed electronics, commissioned and premiered by pianist Jason Hardink. Her solo works with electronics include Sound Imagery No.4 (2014), for marimba and live electronics, commissioned by percussionist Jonathan Singer, and Sound Imagery No.5 (2015), for violin and fixed electronics, written for Grammy Award-winning violinist Karen Kim. She is currently writing Negatives, a song cycle for soprano, nine players, and fixed electronics, for Ensemble Dal Niente.
A complete list of works and commissions is at inesthiebaut.com/works.
She also writes for theater, film, and dance. In 2026 she composed the score for Medea, a feature film by Spanish artist and filmmaker Javier Codesal, for wind band and electronics. She has composed music and designed sound for several productions of the Traverse City theater company Parallel45, and for short films and dance projects in Spain, Portugal, and the US.
Inés received her Ph.D. in composition from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, "Symmetry and Interval Cycles in the Quartettos of Mario Davidovsky," was advised by Joseph Straus. A portion of it was published as "Compositional Spaces in Mario Davidovsky's Quartettos" in Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). She has presented her research on symmetry at SMT, SCI, and MTSMA.
She also holds a Bachelor of Music in music theory from the Professional Conservatory of Music Adolfo Salazar (Madrid, 2002), a Bachelor of Music in composition and film scoring from Berklee College of Music (Boston, 2006), and a Master of Arts in composition from Queens College, CUNY (2009). At CUNY she studied composition with Jason Eckardt, Douglas Geers, Jeff Nichols, and Hubert Howe, and theory with Joseph Straus and L. Poundie Burstein. She has also studied composition with Fabián Panisello and Marcela Rodríguez.
Before joining CSUEB, she held a three-year Visiting Assistant Professor position at the University of Utah and adjunct positions at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, CUNY (2008–2012), and the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University (2013–2014).