Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Unexplainable Places
Growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania where people were often afraid to express their real feelings, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė discovered early on that music was safer than language and a realm where she could express her innermost feelings unedited. Now an international-acclaimed composer who spends a great deal of her time in the United States, she understands that music “surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places.”
inti figgis-vizueta: the ability to grow
inti figgis-vizueta likens her compositions to plants and creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality.
Brandee Younger: A Hip-Hop Baby Transforms the Harp
Brandee Younger has carved out a very unlikely music career for herself, a classically-trained harpist who went from making her jazz debut over a decade ago to being an in-demand leader and collaborator in a wide range of musical genres.
Tina Davidson: Listening Through The Journey
The story of Tina Davidson’s life, which is the basis of her newly published memoir Let Your Heart Be Broken, is extremely intense but also a rewarding reading experience just like the emotional roller coaster rides in so many of her musical compositions make for very compelling listening.
Kevin Puts: Keeping Secrets
Composer Kevin Puts takes pride in keeping secrets, both by being understated in his interactions with people and by never initially giving away all the goods in his music, preferring, as he says, “to keep something in reserve so that there’s a payoff for the attentive listener.” But in this in-depth conversation he reveals some of the secrets about his Metropolitan Opera debut The Hours, his Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night, his symphony inspired by Björk’s album Vespertine, Contact (his triple concerto for Time for Three which just won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition), and much more.
Tania León: The Rhythm of Life
The new music community has been impacted, inspired and transformed by Tania León as a musical creator–as well as an interpreter, educator, and organizer–for decades.
Elena Ruehr: Turning Emotion Into Sound
Elena Ruehr’s prolific output is a by-product of her maintaining a consistent composing schedule (five hours every day from Noon to 5:00pm) as well as her never-ending inspiration from the visual arts and her constant reading (four books a week), plus her desire to communicate with listeners.
Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen): The Landfill of Meaning
Victoria Shen’s needle nails technique, which was appropriated earlier this summer in a Beyoncé video, is just one of many new approaches to making sounds that Shen (who performs under the moniker Evicshen) uses in her provocative performances and installations.
Raven Chacon: Fluidity of Sound
While the idiosyncratic graphic scores of 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning composer Raven Chacon are stunningly original in their conception and have been recognized as works of visual art in their own right (several are in this year’s Whitney Biennial), they have a larger social purpose.
Anthony Davis: Any Means Necessary
For Anthony Davis, whose compositional aesthetics are an amalgamation of several different musical traditions (jazz, Western classical music, gamelan), different kinds of music recall different emotional states and experiences in terms of what the music implies. So it’s inevitable that he has devoted so much of his compositional energies to opera, and in particular to using the operatic medium to tell stories that either deal with significant historic events or which focus on important social concerns.
Sarah Hennies: Getting at the Heart of a Sound
How we perceive sound on a psychological level as it unfolds over time is key to the sonic experiences that Sarah Hennies creates. Despite the extremely broad stylistic range of her output, everything from her early collaborative work as part of an experimental rock band to a multimedia documentary to extended duration solo and chamber music compositions for various instrumental combinations, it all shares a concern for extremely precise sonic gestures and involves a great deal of repetition. While Sarah Hennies prides herself on scores that are extremely economical (a score for a nearly 34-minute piece is a mere two pages), the sonorities feel extremely generous.
Alice Parker: Feeling the Same Emotion at the Same Time
Composer, arranger, conductor, and teacher Alice Parker has been a fixture of the choral music community since working with the legendary Robert Shaw Chorale when she was fresh out of college in the late 1940s. Parker has devoted herself almost exclusively to music for the voice, since she strongly believes that people find their common ground through singing together.
Huang Ruo: Creating Four Dimensional Experiences
For Huang Ruo, music–like theater–exists in a four-dimensional space. There is also a larger purpose in most of Huang Ruo’s work, whether it is to call attention to stories of people, particularly Asians and Asian-Americans, whose voices have often not been heard, or to provide an environment for reflection and healing.
Matthew Aucoin: Risking Generosity
Among the recurring themes of our conversation with composer-pianist-conductor Matthew Aucoin was generosity and risk-taking, something that is in abundance in Aucoin’s own music as well as his personality. Over the course of an hour we talked about his opera Eurydice which was just performed at the Metropolitan Opera, the first commercial recording of his music, his just released new book about opera, The Impossible Art, which was also just released, his desire to develop new musical repertoire that addresses climate change, and much much more.
Terri Lyne Carrington: A World of Sound Waiting for Us
Terri Lyne Carrington was practically born into jazz, but she is not a traditionalist. By embracing elements from rock, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop into her own compositions, she is making music that is very much about the present moment. And in founding the Berklee Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice and now partnering with New Music USA on the new Next Jazz Legacy program, Terri Lyne hopes to build a future that dismantles the jazz patriarchy and eliminates the gender imbalance among instrumentalists.
Renée Baker: Nothing's Gonna Stop You From Creating
Spending an hour over Zoom chatting with Renée Baker about her more than two thousand musical compositions and perhaps almost as many paintings was inspirational as well as motivational. Renée does not let anything deter her and while her music is extremely wide ranging and gleefully embraces freedom of expression, her daily schedule is precise and meticulous.
Adolphus Hailstork: Music is a Service
“Music is supposed to have meaning,” says Dr. Adolphus Hailstork whose music captures the tribulations and the occasional triumphs of African Americans in this country. Hailstork’s 80th birthday year got off to an impressive start with a performance of his music as part of the Presidential Inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden. Since then there has been a world premiere of a concert aria he composed to commemorate the centenary of the Tulsa Massacre and he awaits the premiere of his recently completed Fourth Symphony.
Susie Ibarra: Hybrid Culture
Susie Ibarra’s collaborative approach has informed her work with jazz, classical, indie rock, and traditional Philippine musicians.
Ricky Ian Gordon: My Way of Enveloping a Story
For the past 20 years, Ricky Ian Gordon has been creating works for the stage—operas, musicals, or one-of a-kind music/theater hybrids—and getting them produced one after another, seemingly without a pause. But 14 months ago, everything came to a screeching halt as the world went into lockdown due to the pandemic.
Pamela Z: Expanding Our Imaginations
The only thing that is almost as exciting as watching and listening to a multimedia performance by Pamela Z is to hear her talk about it.
Judith Lang Zaimont: The Music She Has to Write
Judith Lang Zaimont is defiantly unwilling to be typecast for creating music in a particular style, which makes her music always a welcome surprise.
Kris Bowers: In Love With Accompaniment
Kris Bowers creates music that is attuned to whatever project he is working on–whether it’s the score for the 2018 motion picture Green Book, the 2019 EA Sports videogame Madden NFL 20, the 2020 Phyllis Schlafly-inspired Hulu series Mrs. America, or the 2021 Netflix sensation Bridgerton.
Julie Giroux: A Wind Band is a Box of 168 Crayons
Julie Giroux, who creates music primarily for wind band, takes musicians and audiences on a journey that is a real sonic adventure and, at the same time, is always fun.
Valerie Coleman: Writing Music for People
Valerie Coleman is committed to storytelling through her music, no matter the idiom. “I recognize that there are stories that are yet untold that if they were told, they would transform all those who would hear them. So it’s my job to create music that allows that transformative power to happen.”
