Jake Sorgen is a Chicago-based artist working with sound, poetry, music, and movement.

“Jake Sorgen’s languid, lugubrious voice, haunted by burble of whispering voices in the head, lit by backdrop of compassionately strummed acoustic guitar, tear drop steel, lyrical strings and river deep bass; occasionally straying to stranger, convoluted musical places; is illuminated by ruminative instrumentation, almost improvisational jazz and magnetically mesmeric, meandering, swaying half spoken vocal…impossible to put down.“

– Chumki Banerjee, Mudkiss Magazine

In its varying forms, styles, genres, and media, Jake’s work blurs borders between notated and improvised, music and theatre, poetry and song.

Text-music works include The Forgotten Suite (2021), Empty Gestures (2021) with the Invoke String Quartet, i’ve heard you had loved me (2022) with Ashley Bathgate (cello and voice), and the interdisciplinary ensemble, Small Giants with Actor/Director Matt Bowdren and Actor/Movement Artist Sarah Grant.

Concert works have been performed by the Loadbang Ensemble, Kite Quartet, Outlet Trio and members of the Instant Composer’s Pool (NL) and Creative Music Studio (NY). In 2018 he was named the “Maverick Prodigy Composer” by the Maverick Concert Hall in New York and was awarded a 2020 Composer’s Fellowship and 2022 Audio Production Fellowship from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Jake has composed extensively for theatre, dance, podcasts, films, and intermedia performance. Locally Jake has composed and designed sound for Haven Theatre, Redtwist Theatre, The Story Theatre, A Theatre In The Dark, Trap Door Theatre, The Passage Theatre, 2nd Story, Oakton College, Stage Left Theatre, and others. He served as Composer in Residence and Artistic Associate for the American Theatre Wing award-winning Rogue Theatre in Tucson, AZ from 2014-2019 before relocating to Chicago.

Jake holds a BA from Emerson College and an MFA in Music Composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where he studied with Carla Kihlstedt, Roger Zahab, and Michael Early.

“[Jake Sorgen] creates music—and often performs it live—that lends an incalculable depth to our experience of [The Rogue Theatre’s] shows”

– Tucson Weekly