Category: Podcasts and Discussions

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Unexplainable Places

SoundLives Episode 24: Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. (NewMusicBox presented by New Music USA)

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 that it could enable her to express her innermost feelings without self censoring. It ultimately led her on the path to becoming a composer whose music is performed all over the world.  Although Žibuoklė now divides her time between a democratic Lithuania and the United States, her formative experiences have led her to explore a sonic vocabulary, which though frequently inspired by nature and always deeply emotive, is completely abstract and open to multiple interpretations.

“Music is enough; not only enough, it’s more than enough,”  she explained to me during a Zoom conversation last month. “It surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places. The beauty of music is that if you are telling some story, some inner story that you don’t want to reveal the details of, you could still tell the story and the listener would relate to that story. … [T]hey create their own story in their minds because nobody’s telling them what to think. But they have the emotional components that come up, like physiological and psychological reactions to the sounds that they hear.”

This approach to narrative is an ideal modus operandi when creating an orchestral composition or a piece of chamber music, and Žibuoklė has made significant contributions to both of these idioms which have resonated with audiences both in the concert hall and on recordings. Horizons, a 2013 symphonic tour-de-force, has been performed in multiple cities and has been recorded twice. Starkland’s recording of her enhanced piano trio In Search of Lost Beauty was described by Richard Whitehouse in Gramophone magazine as “one of the most significant releases thus far” on that label, praising her music’s “potency.” Last season, soon after the Finnish label Ondine released the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra’s recording of her haunting 2019 Saudade, a work inspired by the death of her father as well as her immigration to the USA, the work received a performance by the New York Philharmonic causing Zachary Woolfe in The New York Times to describe her orchestral writing as “intriguingly agitated.” Bang on a Can’s record label Cantaloupe Music recently released her 2020-21 Hadal Zone, an immersive sonic experience for a quintet of low-ranged instruments and electronics evoking the bottom of the ocean. But how does this play out when composing vocal music?

In our talk, Žibuoklė described her reticence to use words when she first received a commission to write a work for the choir Jauna Muzika in 2010 from the annual Gaida Festival, the most prominent new music festival in Lithuania. After feeling more drawn to the vowels of words in certain texts than the actual words, she ultimately decided to eschew text and set only vowels.

“When I made that choice of not using language, I felt, once again, very liberated,” she admitted, which makes perfect sense considering her life’s experiences. “Music was the way to have that freedom and music was the way to express myself in an absolutely free way and nobody could stop me from that. … That sense of freedom, I think, stayed with me to this day. That’s why music is so precious to me. And that’s why I don’t want to use narratives and text because I feel they would put me into some kind of perceptional prison.”

That first choral work, The Blue of Distance, which was subsequently performed and recorded by the San Francisco-based choir Volti, has led to two others thus far: Chant des Voyelles, which was commissioned by Volti in 2018, and Aletheia, a 2022 work created in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which was premiered by the Latvian Radio Choir during last year’s edition of the Baltic Music Days. All of these pieces were without words although that does not prevent her from conveying a visceral narrative, as she acknowledged in describing Aletheia. “I was thinking … about voice being the first and the very last instrument that we might have in our lives and all those people in the war, how they still have their voices with them and they could express themselves in this rage or scream, even as they are being killed.”

However, Žibuoklė confessed that the piece she is working on right now, a half-hour song cycle for female voice and orchestra, will actually have words. “Yes, I know, it’s quite unusual for me, but I must say I’m enjoying working with it, although I have mixed feelings about how I feel about text. But I will insert some vowel singing without text because I can’t go without it. But it’s this text by this very, very old female poet from more than 4,000 years ago called Enheduanna. … It’s fascinating how the poetry that was composed such a long time ago still contains the same subject matters that are very much today’s topics, like war and migration of people and environmental concerns and catastrophes and gender bending identities. It’s just incredible how all the issues remain the same over and over.”

inti figgis-vizueta: the ability to grow

Banner for SoundLives episode 23 featuring inti figgis-vizueta

Composer inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. She likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people perform them.

“We’re able to continue to revisit them and see how they’ve changed,” she explained when we met over Zoom in mid-June. “I’ll hear people come back and play something that I haven’t heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we’re just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving–it’s very strange.”

inti’s openness to collaboration and belief in interpretative agency has made her music particularly attractive to soloists and ensembles ranging from Andrew Yee and Conrad Tao to Roomful of Teeth, Ensemble Dal Niente, and even the Kronos Quartet who asked her to compose a piece for their 50 for the Future Project.

“I remember hearing about this project and being like, ‘God, I wish I could do that, but I’m never going to be in this thing,'” inti remembered. “It was kind of a short turnaround … I went through all of the other pieces that were up, because this project had been going on for five years and there was a gamut of pieces. There were ones that were so hard. Maybe a graduate string quartet could do it, with a lot of practice. To like very beautiful and simple and quite lyrical pieces with a 16th note pulse or something. … I ended up kind of going from this really complicated score to this very simple score of a single stave that everyone was reading from. … How it happens over time can be determined by the ensemble.”

Over the past few years, inti has gravitated a lot toward string quartets and percussion ensembles, two groups that might seem at oppositive ends of the sonic spectrum to some composers but not to her. “I do feel like there’s a certain level of a kind of shared musicality, a shared sense of tone and timbre and attack and all of these things that contribute to a group mentality of how to kind of play with and affect texture in like all of their kind of individual ways.”

But she is also interested in vocal music and has begun exploring it again after a hiatus of several years where she was mostly focused on instrumental music.

“I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn’t always feel that with vocal ensembles,” she acknowledged. “Then this year and last year has been this kind of a big resurgence of that in my music and in some ways, it’s teaching me things all over again, which has been really, really fun. … I get to kind of luxuriate a little bit in the quality of two people singing together, actually using all of the complexities of a word to push forward meaning. But to me it’s not narrative meaning, and that’s what I was afraid of, that when I had to engage language, I had to be tied to a narrative, instead of being tied to the complexities of thinking about something like love, or lots of other things.”

Ultimately, whatever the medium, inti is interested in constructing open structures that take performers and listeners to new places.

“For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways,” she said. “It’s almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.”

Brandee Younger: A Hip-Hop Baby Transforms the Harp

Brandee Younger sitting next to a harp with the branded text for episode 22 of the NewMusicBox SoundLives podast from New Music USA

Brandee Younger has carved out a very unlikely music career for herself. A classically-trained harpist but also a self-confessed “hip-hop baby” who loves popular music, Younger deeply immersed herself in jazz as an undergrad at the Hartt School and by the time she entered grad school at NYU was already established in that scene. Then shortly after forming her own quartet over a decade ago, Younger soon became a go-to collaborator not only for jazz artists such as Ravi Coltrane and Marcus Strickland, but also for creative artists across a very wide array of genres, including multiple Grammy winners rapper Common, singer-songwriter Lauryn Hill, and R&B producer Salaam Remi.

“I wanted my instrument to fit into my personality; I didn’t want it to be limited,” Younger explained during our recent conversation. “I knew I didn’t want an orchestral career, but even as a kid I wanted to play other styles of music … Over time I finally became comfortable with blending those worlds together, but it took a long time to confidently try and put them together.”

How Younger has transformed the harp, which is typically associated with salons or angels, into such a malleable and yet still distinctive instrument seems without precedent. But she had two very significant role models in Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. Her love for Alice Coltrane, whose cascading harp sonorities matched the intensity of the free jazz improvisers with whom she performed, began in high school when her father gave her a Priceless Jazz compilation of her recordings. She was immediately captivated by “Blue Nile” and soon thereafter asked every jazz musician she encountered if they knew her. Brandee never actually met Alice Coltrane but she was invited to play at her memorial at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2007. Dorothy Ashby, whom Brandee also never met (she was only two years old when Ashby died), has had an even more significant influence on her career trajectory. Ashby also led her own ensembles starting in her 20s and quickly leaped from jazz to a much wider stylistic palette that embraced a spectrum of pop and world music traditions. She even made a guest appearance on Stevie Wonder’s legendary Songs in the Key of Life and, as Brandee pointed out, has been heavily sampled in hip-hop, which is how she first became aware of her.

“The one huge HUGE thing for me in Dorothy Ashby’s music, you listen to what she was recording, she was doing music of the time,” said Younger. “She was playing whatever she wanted. She was not jazz-specific. She was playing traditional Jewish melodies. She was playing the pop tune that came out. She was playing the soundtrack of the most popular movie that came out. And to think back as a kid and what I wanted to do, I wanted to play the pop music that I heard on the radio. I wanted to play these familiar tunes for my friends and family.”

So it makes sense that Brandee Younger would want to record an album acknowledging Dorothy Ashby. But that album, Brand New Life, which was just released in April, is a far-cry from an ossified compendium of covers.

“It was really important for me to make it 2023,” Younger explained. “It wasn’t to be a tribute album, you know, it was to really celebrate her legacy but like moving along. … It was really important for me to collaborate with folks that shared a special kinship with her. And the first person to pop up was of course Pete Rock who was the first person I know of to sample her.”

Brand New Life also features a memorable contribution from Meshell Ndegeocello, who is featured on a reggae-infused version of “Dust,” an Ashby original which was originally released on her 1970 LP The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby. And Mumu Fresh, who is mostly known as a rapper, adds extremely soulful vocals to Younger’s original “Brand New Life,” the title track.

Brandee is currently on tour, her first time traveling to different cities to perform since the pandemic shut down everything three years ago. It’s been a long wait, but she won’t only be playing material from Brand New Life. She’ll also be performing her extraordinary original Unrest, a turbulent composition created during lockdown.

“We’ll be doing new music and some of the stuff from the last album,” she explained. “I also will throw in an Ashby or Coltrane tune because that’s my thing, what I’ve been doing forever. And the tour is mostly going to be trio–Rashaan Carter on bass, Alan Menard on drums. So yeah, harp trio baby.”

Tina Davidson: Listening Through The Journey

Photo of Tina Davidson sitting at a desk with an overlay of the SoundLives logo

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.

As she told Frank J. Oteri, “When you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and hopefully you can do that without making other people vulnerable in your life.”

Several weeks ago I started reading Let Your Heart Be Broken, a memoir by the composer Tina Davidson. For many years I’ve treasured the two CDs of her intense chamber music which made me immediately intrigued to learn her biographical details. It turns out the story of her life was far more complicated that anything I could have imagined, although I probably should have imagined as much given the emotional roller coaster rides in so many of her extremely compelling musical compositions.

I shouldn’t give it all away just yet, though be forewarned that there are some spoiler alerts in the recording of my talk with her posted above and in the full transcript of it below. So if you’re worried that reading or listening to the giveaways  might ruin the experience of reading the book for you, and it is  rewarding reading, I’d strongly suggest getting the book and reading it first before engaging further here.

But my conversation with Tina also took a much deeper dive into some of her musical compositions and her writing process than she would have been able to get into in a book aimed at general readers. However, what compelled me to speak with her was a passage from that book in which she explains why she mostly eschews conventional musical development in her output:

In the classical music tradition, development is a process by which a composer uses the musical material of a piece … Many living composers use development as a chief technique in their music. They push the melodies around and rework them by directly transposing or inverting them. My ear pauses. Why do I feel they stand at the river’s edge, beating their musical material with stones until it is thin, weak, and colorless?

“Music, for me, is like bread. I define the ingredients, actively knead the dough. There is an essential part I cannot do–the rising. I provide the right size pan, large enough so the bread can expand to its fullest potential and small enough so it can use the side of a pan as support. I decide when the bread has risen enough without too much poking around. This is a judgment of my eye, heart, and mind acting together. Rising too much, it will be filled with air and collapse. Rising too little, it will be mean and hard, an impenetrable nugget.

For Tina, as she explained to me when I brought up this passage to her, “That’s the risk you take with your work. You don’t always write great music. You have flops. I have pieces where I go, ‘Oh, boy, I hope they don’t see the light of day!’ I don’t know why. It just didn’t happen. I try not to revise a lot of things. If I have a piece that I don’t love I’ll just say, ‘Okay, next piece.'”

In addition to being like bread, a piece of music is also always a journey and Tina’s hope is that she can ultimately bring the audience along with her on the trip.

It’s about me traveling and hopefully you listening with me through the journey of the piece and that wonderful sense that you can’t actually touch music, you know, it’s so ephemeral. You reconstruct that journey through memory. As you get to the end of the piece, it doesn’t make any sense unless you could remember the beginning. So it’s you as an active participant that really creates the pieces as a whole. I think that composers actually collaborate with everyone. They collaborate with the performers as the performers really inhabit your music and it has to be shaped on their body. And then the audience. You kind of collaborate with them as an extension of receiving it. … I’m not telling them; I hope that I’m eliciting from them their own response. … [W]hen I write a piece of music, I try to articulate where I am the most the best that I can. And what I’ve noticed is that when it’s out there, it’s not that people get me, but they get themselves. And that’s what I love. That it’s almost as if something about my music or that experience resonates with something in them and they can experience themselves. And that’s what I’d hope for.

The ability for people to form their own narratives when they listen to an abstract piece of instrumental music is not quite the same as being able to empathize with an author when reading the details of a first person narrative and Tina is very conscious of the difference in these modalities.

“I think in the beginning of my composing journey, as a young person what I loved about it is I could be anonymous, she acknowledged toward the beginning of our discussion. “I think that as I grew through my 30s and then 40s–I’ve been writing for 45 years–I found I resolved a lot of personal issues and had more courage to come forward and be direct, to say, ‘this is what I’m writing about.’ Certainly I suppose that the memoir is the full circle of that. When you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and hopefully you can do that without making other people vulnerable in your life. And I worked really hard at being honest without calling people names or having judgments about their behavior necessarily.”

 

Kevin Puts: Keeping Secrets

Banner for Episode 20 of SoundLives showing Kevin Puts during a rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera

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 explained to me last month when we chatted for a about an hour over Zoom, “to keep something in reserve so that there’s a payoff for the attentive listener.” Nevertheless, during the course of our conversation he revealed some fascinating secrets about many of his compositions including his latest opera The Hours (which received its world premiere on November 22 at the Metropolitan Opera), his first opera Silent Night (for which he received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music), his Symphony No. 3 (which was inspired by Björk), and Contact (his triple concerto for Time for Three which just won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition).

Puts’s opera The Hours received an extraordinary lavish production that most composers can only dream of. It featured a huge cast headlined by three top operatic stars–Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara–plus a gargantuan chorus which frequently takes center stage. When the production was announced it seemed to come out of nowhere, but it was in the works for five years. It grew directly out of Puts’s previous collaboration with Fleming, Letters From Georgia, a five moment song cycle based on letters that the painter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. After Fleming announced she was no longer focusing on standard operatic repertoire and wanted to devote her energies to singing new roles, Puts casually asked her if she’d be amenable to singing in an opera if he wrote one for her. Within weeks she suggested an opera based on The Hours, a complex narrative that interweaves stories of women in three different time periods which had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as well as a successful Hollywood film. Puts, who had read the book and saw the movie and loved them both, said that he instantly “could imagine the kinds of things that you could do on the operatic stage that are not possible in a book or in a film.” Soon thereafter she mentioned the idea to Peter Gelb who was immediately excited about a work that could star three major box office draws. Curiously, these three women don’t actually sing together until the very end of the opera. Even though the entire opera is building toward that moment, Puts admitted that he didn’t compose that material until very late in the game. As he explained, “What I used to do is I would compose where I’m going before I got there, and actually that’s something I don’t do anymore. … Getting there was something I had to earn as a composer.”

Gelb was amenable to Fleming’s suggestion of commissioning Kevin Puts after listening to a recording of Puts’s first opera Silent Night, a work which also juxtaposing three different story lines involving groups of soldiers from Scotland, France, and Germany who come to a brief truce in 1914 during First World War. Based on the screenplay for the multilingual film Joyeux Noël which in turn was based on real life events, it was an ideal opportunity for Puts to demonstrate his skills in setting words in multiple languages and, since one of the German soldiers is an operatic tenor, it also gave Puts an opportunity to show off his ability to compose music that evokes the lush sound world of late Romantic operas.

The other two operas that Puts has composed thus far are based on The Manchurian Candidate, a fascinating political thriller written in 1959 that has been adapted twice for the screen and seems extremely relevant to our current zeitgeist, and Elizabeth Cree based on a Victorian-themed whodunit by Peter Ackroyd, which also allowed Puts to create music that enhances the impact of surprise through introducing new sonic elements. While Puts’s compositional approach is well suited to the operatic stage, it is also how he constructs his extremely effective concertos and symphonies which for him can also be narrative despite being abstract instrumental works. In fact, his first two symphonies were both cast in a single movement so that they would have the same impact as a motion picture which is a continuous experience from start to finish.

“As has been noted many times, there’s a cinematic quality to my music,” Puts acknowledged. “In fact, I love film, and not just film music, but I love film itself. I think with those single-movement pieces, I thought, ‘I want to make an unbroken narrative arc like a film.’ Why should we have to stop?”

But Puts changed his approach with his Third Symphony, a three movement work that was inspired by hearing Björk’s 2001 album Vespertine although it does not use any of her music and is completely original. He got the idea for the piece while he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and an art historian also in residence there was watching a music video of Björk on television.

“I’m not up-to-date on a lot of things that are going on, like pop music,” he admitted. “But this is gorgeous! So beautiful timbrally, gorgeous string textures and choral textures. And I really liked the shapes of her voice, the melodic quality of her singing in relation to the oddness and the transparency and the fragility of her singing, and sometimes power as well in relation to this sonic world around her. So I want to do something with it. I want to react to this in my own way. I was interested in making this kind of swirling sound world circling around the melodic ideas of the piece and to have the melodic ideas just in some sense be an imitation of her vocal style, and that’s really all it is. I wasn’t really interested in using melodies. … More just reacting to the sound world of that album.”

Puts just received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Contact, a triple concerto he wrote for Time for Three, a string trio that blurs the lines between classical music, Americana, and pop. “Most of the writing of the concerto for Time for Three was done before we went into isolation,” he recalled. “Then we just continued to work on it. We edited, we revised, we tried things out, we added and subtracted and I reorchestrated quite a bit.”

But despite being composed for a group whose usual fare is rooted in the here and now, Puts took the group on a very different musical journey even though it could not been conceived in any other time but in our own.

As he explained, “You probably know this quote from Rachmaninoff. He said, ‘I tried to embrace the music of my time and I feel like a ghost walking among the living.’ I just feel like I sort of do what I do. The sort of things I do as a musician and a composer are so deeply ingrained. They’re such a huge part of who I am. They’re the things that really excite me, and often, the very, very simple things, as you can hear in the music … It’s just truly what I find most exciting about the music I love, these simple, beautiful moments that probably end up being almost nothing on the page, but what they do to me emotionally is fantastic.”

Not worrying about whether your music fits in with the current moment and being true to who you are is also the advice he gives other composers, both as a composition teacher at the Peabody Institute and as the director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute.

“I just feel like what’s going on right now in this moment, of course you should be open to whatever’s going on, the zeitgeist, but I would just look at all of music that you’ve heard, that meant something to you from the very beginning, and feel like it’s okay to incorporate all of that and to sort of build a voice from all of it and have that be the part of you that remains inviolate to all these pressures that exist right now in the world, all the transparency that exists through social media, that feels like there’s no private space now. I would make your music your private space and the place you can do the things you believe fervently in and that you’re most emotionally connected to. That’s certainly been my approach to things over the how many years I’ve been doing this.”

dublab — The Current Landscape in Composition, Film Scoring and Publishing

Web Header (1200 × 500px) - Sen Moreira & Casey MQ

Warp Composers‘ Sen Moreira is joined by producer and composer Casey MQ in a conversation about the current landscape in the world of composition, film scoring, and publishing in an ever changing music industry.

Sen Moreira is the North America Licensing & Composer Manager for the newly established Warp Composers, representing composers across Warp Publishing and Warp Records rosters from their offices in Los Angeles and London.

Casey Manierka-Quaile is an artist, producer and composer from Toronto, now based in Los Angeles. He is classically trained as a pianist and has written and produced under the artist name of Casey MQ, collaborating with the likes of Oklou, Christine & The Queens, Flume and more. Winner of the 2021 Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Song, Manierka’s scores have premiered at TIFF, SXSW, Berlinale, Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festival.

This program is part of New Music USA’s web magazine NewMusicBox “Guest Editor series”, which aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation and will feature exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization. The series kicks off with dublab. NewMusicBox, edited by Frank J. Oteri, amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms, and has provided a vital platform for creators to speak about issues relevant to them in their own words since 1999.

The dublab partnership will feature new weekly content from at least 15 different voices through January 2023, presented in conversations, DJ mixes, articles, and live performances all exploring the current landscape of music composition.

The Guest Editor is the first such series in the magazine’s 23-year history and reflects New Music USA’s aim to deepen its impact across the many diverse music communities across the United States. This aim is also demonstrated by NewMusicBox’s ongoing “Different Cities, Different Voices” feature that spotlights music creation hubs across the nation.

dublab — Staying True in the Film Industry

Chanda Dancy & Chandler Poling

Dublab Radio DJ Chandler Poling of Studio Soundtracks interviews film composer Chanda Dancy about her musical upbringing, her inspirations, and her creative contributions to the Sony Pictures’ feature film Devotion.  Together they discuss the public perception of what a composer is and how Chanda’s work challenges that perspective.

Native Texan Chanda Dancy started composing orchestral works at the age of 12. She has been described as a “phenomenal composer” (Ted Chung, Zacuto: Featured Filmmakers) and “quickly gaining recognition as a foremost black American contemporary composer.” (Anthony Parnther, Conductor, San Bernardino Symphony). Her works are described as “emotionally penetrating” (John Malveaux, Africlassical.com) and “rich” (George Heymont, Huffington Post).

An alumnus of the USC Film Scoring Program, and the Sundance Composers Lab, Chanda is both an accomplished film and television composer with over 18 years of experience and an emerging classical concert composer. Arts Boston named her one of “10 Contemporary Black Composers You Should Know”. She is known for her work on the Sundance award winning documentary Aftershock (Disney/Onyx Collective), the hit Netflix TV Original The Defeated starring Taylor Kitsch, the Korean War era epic Devotion starring Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell, and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody, directed by Kasi Lemmons.

Chandler Poling is the Co-Founder of White Bear PR, a Public Relations firm specializing in Publicity for Composers, Songwriters, Music Supervisors, and Film & Music Festivals around the world.  Throughout his career, Chandler has run successful Oscar, Golden Globe, Grammy, BAFTA and Emmy campaigns securing nominations and wins. His clients have been featured in national and international publications, such as Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, New York Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, LA Times, and Rolling Stone Magazine to name just a few. He created the first ever composer-focused panel at Comic-Con San Diego, the World’s Largest Pop Culture Convention.  These panels are now an ongoing tradition – a platform for composers to discuss their craft and meet their fans. In addition to producing and moderating panels, Chandler has been invited to give lectures on PR for Composers at Berklee College of Music, Royal College of Music, NYU, USC, and internationally in Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Krakow, Cologne, Ghent, and others. In Los Angeles, he is a radio DJ for the independent station Dublab where he hosts a monthly program called Studio Soundtracks featuring conversations with music professionals in the film, television and video game industries. He is proud to be part of the founding leadership of The Alliance for Women Film Composers and Vice President of Qweerty Gamers – a non-profit LGBTQ video game advocacy organization.

dublab — Samora and Elena Pinderhughes in conversation exploring the boundaries of creation

dublab: Samora and Elena Pinderhughes

Samora and Elena Pinderhughes in conversation around the blurred boundaries between composer, musician, instrumentalist, producer and songwriter. The musical multi-hyphenates dive deep into anecdotes, personal narratives and a bit of philosophy around their processes, their truths and the ways they’ve evolved as creators. They converse with a depth only collaborators who are also siblings can reach.

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. In addition to his active music career and multidisciplinary artistic work, Samora is a PhD candidate in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry at Harvard. Elena, who happens to be Samora’s sister, has been a celebrated flautist since she was 9 years old. Having toured and collaborated with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Common, Christian Scott, Future, and many more, Elena is also a singer and songwriter, most recently featured by Apple Music “Freedom Songs” Juneteenth series.

This program is part of New Music USA’s web magazine NewMusicBox “Guest Editor series”, which aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation and will feature exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization. The series kicks off with dublab. NewMusicBox, edited by Frank J. Oteri, amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms, and has provided a vital platform for creators to speak about issues relevant to them in their own words since 1999.

The dublab partnership will feature new weekly content from at least 15 different voices through January 2023, presented in conversations, DJ mixes, articles, and live performances all exploring the current landscape of music composition.

The Guest Editor is the first such series in the magazine’s 23-year history and reflects New Music USA’s aim to deepen its impact across the many diverse music communities across the United States. This aim is also demonstrated by NewMusicBox’s ongoing “Different Cities, Different Voices” feature that spotlights music creation hubs across the nation.

dublab — Compositional Curiosities

Web Header co branding (New Musicn USA & dublab) - Beatie Wolfe & Mark Mothersbaugh

Listen to Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and visionary artist Beatie Wolfe talk about the art of composition and other creative curiosities their worlds collide with, including their viral campaign Postcards for Democracy.

Presented as part of ON AIR LA ANNEX, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and “musical weirdo and visionary” Beatie Wolfe discuss the art of composition, building worlds, and how being a conceptual artist can further open up and inform these spaces. Straddling multidisciplines, the pair also revisit Postcards for Democracy, their 2020 collective art campaign in support of USPS, and chat about its impact and how they are still receiving cards today ahead of the next election.

This program is part of New Music USA’s web magazine NewMusicBox “Guest Editor series”, which aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation and will feature exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization. The series kicks off with dublab. NewMusicBox, edited by Frank J. Oteri, amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms, and has provided a vital platform for creators to speak about issues relevant to them in their own words since 1999.

The dublab partnership will feature new weekly content from at least 15 different voices through January 2023, presented in conversations, DJ mixes, articles, and live performances all exploring the current landscape of music composition.

The Guest Editor is the first such series in the magazine’s 23-year history and reflects New Music USA’s aim to deepen its impact across the many diverse music communities across the United States. This aim is also demonstrated by NewMusicBox’s ongoing “Different Cities, Different Voices” feature that spotlights music creation hubs across the nation.

dublab – Composing for Film: A Conversation with Emily Rice

An altered image of Emily Rice against a blue background with the NMUSA and dublab logos superimposed

 

For this edition of dublab x New Music USA, join Elyn Kazarian and film composer Emily Rice as they discuss the process behind composing, collaborating with directors, finding your own voice, and ways to build a strong financial foundation. The first hour of the program will include a 30 minute mix of songs from various film scores composed by women.

This program is part of New Music USA’s web magazine NewMusicBox “Guest Editor series”, which aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation and will feature exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization. The series kicks off with dublab. NewMusicBox, edited by Frank J. Oteri, amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms, and has provided a vital platform for creators to speak about issues relevant to them in their own words since 1999.

The dublab partnership will feature new weekly content from at least 15 different voices through January 2023, presented in conversations, DJ mixes, articles, and live performances all exploring the current landscape of music composition.

The Guest Editor is the first such series in the magazine’s 23-year history and reflects New Music USA’s aim to deepen its impact across the many diverse music communities across the United States. This aim is also demonstrated by NewMusicBox’s ongoing “Different Cities, Different Voices” feature that spotlights music creation hubs across the nation.

 

Tracklist

“Life As A Carer” – Rachel Portman
“Eviction Notice” – Pinar Toprak
“Something to Believe in Again” – Pinar Toprak
“Main Title” (The Shining) – Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind
“Rocky Mountains” – Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind
“Defeated Clown” – Hildur Guðnadóttir
“Gallery” – Hildur Guðnadóttir
“Northwest Neighbourhood” – Emily Rice, Ro Rowan
“Smoke” – Lesley Barber
“Manchester Minimalist Piano and Strings” – Lesley Barber
“Coco’s Theme” – Kathryn Bostic
“Rising” – Morgan Kibby
“When We Were Boys” – Morgan Kibby
“Ronsel Leaves” – Tamar-Kali
“But For Love” – Tamar-Kali