Category: Spotlight

Ken Ueno Photo by Alexandra Gardner Tune in to Counterstream Radio on July 24 at 9 p.m. for more talk and full tracks of Ueno’s music. If you’re away on your own assignments, you can catch the recap on July 27 at 3 p.m. Sample a bit of the discussion right now.

Ken Ueno is a man comfortable with a gear shift—a composer of music that thrills with its interior complexity in one case and probes the ear deeply with a simple overtone vocal line in the next. He is also as likely to pick up the inspiration for his work inside a candy store and a childhood memory as in the text of Calvino, Beckett, or Joyce. “I think about the influence of the internet and cable television and globalization,” says Ueno, a Brooklyn-born Japanese-American. “I am a multiplicity of identities, maybe unresolved. And maybe one possible contemporary proposition is that it doesn’t have to be a resolved linearity. I think that’s part of the liberation of being a musicmaker today; we can engage with all of these things.”

Ueno was a bit delayed to that engagement. As a West Point cadet he was headed towards a career in civil service and politics before an injury redirected his course. An guitarist by avocation, he opened a window on a professional music career at Berklee College of Music, and topped that off with further study at Boston University, Yale, and Harvard. A year at the American Academy in Rome followed, and this fall he leaves an assistant professor position at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. A scan down his resume paints a picture of a man deeply engaged with the theory and the production of music in addition to one with an impressively weighty library of scores—one which encompasses everything from work for his own solo voice to full orchestra pieces.

That’s not to overlook the scuba diving license in his wallet and the Mohawk that accents his head (though it would be hard to miss it).

As you might expect with a CV that loaded, Ueno comes to the table with a few ideas about music, but he has a tendency to speak in a way that builds up the dinner-table conversation without dominating the room. And maybe it’s fitting, then, that no matter the number of players on the stage or the amps flowing through the gear, Ueno is focused on the real over the reproduction: The alchemy of performers and audiences in a room.

“Usually you think of technology and recordings as something that enhances the means of art in reproduction, but I’ve been interested in ways that that can be kind of subverted,” explains Ueno. “If you privilege the live experience, then you privilege the fact that it’s ephemeral.”

In his own life, the most important listening experiences—the ones that have stuck with him and transformed his thinking—have been those dynamic live concert experiences, and those are the kind of experience he wants to create for his own audiences. “The audience knows there’s a certain part of it that is not reproducible through mechanical means; that having gone to see it, they know that they’ve shared in this communal thing that happened and then at that moment realize that if they were to experience a CD or DVD representation of what had happened, they know that they would have definitely lost something.”

It’s also a focus he applies to composition. Though his music can convey expansive plains, it often also carries an intimacy that feels expertly fitted to the performer on stage and that’s no accident. “It’s one of the things I have to think a lot about. Who am I writing for? What would make them feel comfortable and in what ways can I engage with what they’re good at doing so that together we can create something that’s meaningful for all?”

Ueno equates his role in this process with that of an expert tailor. “I get a look at the guy [and ask], ‘So are you going to wear this on your wedding day or is it everyday you’re going to wear this?’ and I take the measurements. Then hopefully it’s comfortable and the person wears it and everybody thinks ‘Hey, you look good, man. Where’d you get that suit?'”

Google “Molly Thompson” and you’ll turn up only one high-ranking link related to the composer/singer who put out the 2007 album Ash. Her own dedicated website is not quite ready for public attention, and though she’s performed her own work on New York stages and written for the California EAR Unit and the fearless new music pianist Kathleen Supové, the online chatter is at a surprising hush. Somehow, however, it also seems fitting considering the noir-ish stylings of Thompson’s smoky vocal music, but is it an intentional artistic angle?

Molly Thompson at home in her studio Photo by Karen Lindskog Tune in to Counterstream Radio on June 26 at 9 p.m. for more talk and full tracks of Thompson’s music. If you miss the show, you can catch the recap on June 29 at 3 p.m. Eavesdrop on a sample of the interview right now.

“I guess I’m a little shy,” Thompson confesses. “I know it’s totally silly, but I think I’m much more vocal as a performer and as a person one-on-one, and I’m still kind of figuring out my way in the Internet universe.”

Shy is a word you otherwise wouldn’t immediately associate with Thompson. On stage, her music comes across the listener as honestly raw and yet sophisticatedly crafted, filled with intimate lyrics and intriguing cross-genre influences. Off stage, she’s disarmingly forthcoming—the kind of woman you could easily think of as your best friend after a 15-minute conversation. Still, her musical personality seems to draw a curtain around some more mysterious internal characters. It keeps her audiences on their toes and asking themselves, “Did she really just sing what I think she did?” Sometimes it leaves the musicians performing her work guessing as well.

“I get these kind of facial expressions from people in my ensemble every once in a while when they haven’t heard a song,” she admits with a laugh. “I see these eyes just pop up, and I’m like, ‘I guess they haven’t heard that lyric before!'”

That Thompson feels confident enough to write starkly confessional lyrics and to push at traditional stylistic boundaries is a boon for her artistically as a composer and as a performer, but it can also feel like a wall. She explains, “I think part of the reason I began focusing on songs and singing is because I wanted to speak to people in a more direct way. So it’s kind of interesting when people say, ‘Oh, but the way you’re doing it, some people don’t understand it.’

“It is a dilemma, because if you have the potential to reach masses and you could maybe do something a little differently in order to reach them, are you supposed to do that?”

Thompson is sensitive to all these issues, but the right answers are not yet clear to her and the examination process is necessary but exhausting work. “It’s made me question: What am I doing as an artist? What am I achieving? Who am I hoping to speak to?” she says. “These are honestly hard things to be thinking a lot about, because I just want to sit down and write my music.”

Ned McGowan is a sponge. Although born and raised in the United States, he has now lived in Amsterdam for a third of his life. “Sometimes my grammar starts to be Dutch, and maybe that will creep in,” McGowan warns as the interview starts. Not only is his sentence structure affected, the guttural consonants and lilting vowels of the Dutch language begin to slip into his speech with greater frequency as the interview progresses. What’s more, he seems to be completely unaware of it, as though the random mixing of accents were completely natural.

Ned McGowan Photo by Aldo Allessie Tune in to Counterstream Radio and catch a full hour of talk and music with composer Ned McGowan on May 22 at 9 p.m. If you miss the show, catch the recap on May 25 at 3 p.m. Check out a sample of the interview right now.

This assimilative tendency helps define McGowan as a musician as well. Once in Amsterdam, McGowan says that “I found myself saying, ‘What am I going to do?’ We live in this age of specialization it seems like, but I’m just getting broader, not more specific.” But this broadness has been his boon, turning him into a musical polymath whose diversity of interests is perhaps his greatest asset. Trained as a classical flutist, he now also has considerable facility on both the Indian bamboo and the contrabass flutes. He organizes the Karnatic Lab, a concert series in the Netherlands which also supplies the name of his record label. He has taught at the Djam School for Jazz and the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He is a founding member of the savage and often comic ensemble Hexnut, with its covers of Meshuggah, Tom Waits, and the Flintstones. He also participates in the Balkan folk-tinged group Messing with PVC, whose name is a reference to the polymer construction of the contrabass flute he plays. He is at home with Indian, jazz, folk, and modern avant-garde styles. Oh, and he also composes.

McGowan, however, was no Jay Greenberg. He didn’t start writing his own music until after he moved to Amsterdam at age 26, although he became so immersed that he was soon back in school getting a degree from the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. “It just naturally came together that I could bring together all my influences into composition,” he explains. “As a musician, I’ve always been taking on new things. And I think that has really helped contribute to me as a composer, and given me lots of ideas and inspiration to choose from.”

His music has grown not only to have breadth of influence, but also breadth of expression. The emotive ends of his works run the full gamut: the blistering and humorous Tools; the darkly affective Second City; the ambiguous and introspective Moonrise; and the space age ecstasy of Alap. But it’s McGowan’s desire for exploration that drives him forward, forging his unique syntheses. “Composing for me is a discovery process, as much as it is a composing process. In a way, there’s a universality to composing. There is a way that music works, and I’m trying to discover that.”

Pianist Jenny Lin may have a small, lean frame, but she’s no weakling. Truth be told, she weighs in at 105 lbs., but at the piano keyboard, she’s a bona fide heavyweight—attacking some of the most challenging repertoire with raw strength and energy. Whether it’s the grandiose sweep of a Chopin etude or a defiant new piece by a little-known young composer, she dedicates every ounce of her musical prowess to deliver knock-’em-dead interpretations. It’s the passion and dedication that she brings to the table that sets her apart in the field. Lin doesn’t merely perform music, she genuinely lives it.

Jenny Lin Tune in to Counterstream Radio and catch a full hour of talk and music with pianist Jenny Lin on April 24 at 9 p.m. If you miss the show, catch the recap on April 27 at 3 p.m. Check out a sample of the interview right now.

“When the music actually does something to me physically—not only as a performer, but as a listener—I’m really excited by it,” Lin explains. “Sometimes it’s like a drug; just to be completely taken into the sheer power or activities of the music. Then I say, ‘Well, if it moves me, it’s probably going to move a lot of other people.'” On this front, Lin’s intuition is spot-on. And when she is excited by something, her infallible fingers transmit her enthusiasm, as well as the music’s gestalt, directly to listeners’ ears.

From Shostakovich to Ruth Crawford Seeger to Johannes Maria Staud, the music that has entered her repertoire hails from all over the stylistic map, which in a way reflects Lin’s own globetrotting upbringing. She was born in Taiwan, raised in Austria, and studied in Geneva and at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, among other places. Now she calls New York City her home, but her performing and recording career often takes her to Europe and Asia. Even with all of this jet-setting, however, she remains as down-to-earth as you can get.

She is also a performer who sees the bigger picture. With over a decade of experience working with living, breathing composers, she’s learned that “just because it’s written on a score doesn’t mean it’s absolute.” Like every composer, she knows music goes well beyond what the page implies. If she runs into any technical issues surrounding playability, she’ll certainly find some way to surmount the problem, and then may even suggest alternative solutions to a composer in order to make the piece more user-friendly so that others, who might not posses her stellar chops, can eventually tackle the same piece. “I always try to help composers to create pieces for the piano that will be available to all pianists and not just Jenny Lin.” She helps them understand that “pianists get really discouraged when they see something they can’t really play.”

It’s this sort of generosity, along with her loyalty to young composers that she really believes in, which makes her a vital supporter of contemporary music. She’s always forging ahead with new repertoire. “I really hate the fact that a lot of new pieces get played once,” she bemoans. “When I receive a new piece I try to find plenty of opportunities for the piece to be played, if not a [commercial] recording.”

Despite her unwavering dedication to new work, she doesn’t compose music herself. “I think composing is such a huge responsibility. There’s so much music and not enough performers.” Well, not enough performers like Jenny Lin, anyway.

The timbres are assaultive without being histrionic. The rhythms are propulsive yet stuttering, eluding easy dissection. And everything just keeps repeating, hesitantly, as if the music itself has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. An encounter with Alex Mincek’s music is nothing if not memorable. Isolated parts of his pieces are identifiable as being influenced by free jazz, minimalism, the European avant-garde, or even late German Romanticism. However, when all these disparate elements are evoked in his works, they create an aggregation that’s completely viscerally compelling.

Alex Mincek Tune in to Counterstream Radio and catch a full hour of talk and music with Alex Mincek on March 27 at 9 p.m. If you miss the show, catch the recap on March 30 at 3 p.m. Check out a sample of the interview right now.

The first piece I heard of his was To Nowhere From Nowhere for chamber ensemble and voice, performed by Wet Ink, which he participates in as a founding composer and saxophonist. The most affecting and interesting thing about the music was the use of the voice, which spends most of the piece singing staccato notes constrained to a range of about a major third. Mincek explains, “The idea was to take something, but have it be unrecognizable. And actually have the way that the singer is being used also be so confining that you can’t tell if it’s actually even a singer. It can be an actress; it can be somebody who has no involvement in the arts at all. Something that’s just so confined that it makes ambiguous the whole bel canto idea.”

Mincek’s process in this piece—taking a classical Italian idea, filtering it through German modernism, and repeating it obsessively in a sound world belonging to neither tradition—is itself emblematic of how his music often works. His melting pot mentality creates something very American, but also distinctly individual.

Intense, opinionated, and articulate, Mincek the man is certainly reflected in his music. Both find impish delight in playing against assumptions on how things are supposed to behave. Listeners might get caught up in the improvisatory energy of his music, fueled by Mincek’s jazz background, only to find themselves unexpectedly entangled in a web of repetitive sound blocks. He explains that “there is something about just getting an idea in your head and letting it spin out as if it was an improvisation. But then the next step wouldn’t just be writing those [ideas] down. I would try to see, within that kind of superficial piece that I created in my head, if there were connections that I didn’t detect while I was thinking about it. So then I’ll start writing down little ideas and seeing trajectories on a less improvised level.” The result is a music that so constantly subverts expectation that the arrested flow becomes completely organic.

Mincek resists easy categorization at every level. Since he is doctoral candidate at Columbia University, listeners might be tempted to pigeonhole him as an ivory tower academic. But, like many composers of his generation, Mincek grew up not with the Three B’s, but with jazz, musicals, and… teenie pop. “I definitely find myself maybe just strategically trying to go against what people would think I’m interested in,” Mincek says. “And I’m not lying, I honestly like these things, but I can’t tell if there’s some kind of subconscious motive I have to be contrary to the expectation people have. So when people hear my music and categorize it as some kind of avant-garde new music, and then they take the iPod headphones away and hear that I’m listening to Tiffany, it gives me a little pleasure.”

As a child growing up on an Alabama agricultural station, composer Elizabeth Brown didn’t envision having a future life in music. If you had stopped her ten-year-old self and asked her, in fact, she probably would have told you she was going to be a veterinarian. There just wasn’t a lot of music in her day-to-day life, and, she says, “I certainly didn’t know there were living composers. This was pre-internet, and the T.V. only got one channel.”

Elizabeth Brown Photo by Peter Schaaf Tune in to Counterstream Radio and catch a full hour of talk and music with Elizabeth Brown on February 21 at 9 p.m. If you miss the show, catch the recap on February 24 at 3 p.m. Check out a sample of the interview right now.

Though Brown didn’t start out with composing aspirations, the music was already forming. “I’ve always had music in my head,” she acknowledges, but “it never occurred to me that I could be a composer before I started writing.”

That writing, however, didn’t begin until she was in her late 20s. Instead, her early career focus was on performance. “I started playing flute in high school. I managed to get to conservatory and then I managed to get to Juilliard and then I started playing professionally in New York. I had a boyfriend at the time who was a choreographer and who asked me to write a piece for his dance company, and I started writing and never stopped.”

Her musical language might most accurately be compared to the vagaries of human memory—often a glimmer of thought expressed in sound that refuses to stay put long enough to grasp. She has a habit of leaving a lot of play in her musical line, particularly when it comes to pitch, and by not clamping down, somehow it often seems that she allows room for the listener to hear so much more.

“It’s as if the ground is not really stable,” she explains. “I’ve been drawn to instruments because they slide and they have this aspect—this kind of inhuman vocal quality of bending and sliding. It’s just what I hear; I don’t know why. That’s what it’s like in my head.”

She then takes that internal soundtrack and adjusts it to fit the real instruments at hand as closely as possible. As an active performer, she can also rely on her own significant chops and a stable of friends and colleagues who support her work to make those sound worlds a reality. And while it can be tricky to meet the demands of both her performing and composing careers, it’s a balancing act she takes pleasure in executing.

“I play too many instruments and they all need practicing and I certainly don’t have time to do it all,” Brown admits. “But I’ve been able to make a living pretty much since I got out of school as a musician in one way or another, and I’m grateful for that. And if I’m too busy, it’s only because I’m too busy doing things I really care about. So when I freak, I just try to remind myself how lucky I am.”

John Bischoff Photo by Jim Block Think the history of computer music only dates back to 1995? There’s obviously a lot more to this story than the laptop. Tune in to Counterstream Radio on January 24 (@ 9 p.m. ET), when John Bischoff will share more about what the evolution of this music looks like and has involved for him. If you miss the broadcast, we’ll hit refresh and play it again on January 27 (@ 3 p.m. ET).

Now that the kids are forgoing those traditional rent-free, gasoline-scented rehearsal spaces their parents provided and are moving their musical creativity onto their hard drives, the concept of creating music without computers can seem very far removed. But thanks to a recent New World Records release of The League of Automatic Music Composers, 1978–1983, we can all reach back through the years and listen—again, or for the first time—to what made-at-home computer music meant before Apple invented it.

One of the extraordinary gentlemen who appears on that disc is co-founding League member John Bischoff, a man who has been a pioneer in the field of live computer music since he bought his first KIM-1 in the mid-1970s.

“Prior to that the only way you could use a computer to do music was to be connected to some institution and use a mainframe,” explains Bischoff. “The computer music facilities at, say, a Stanford University or Columbia or somewhere like that fostered a lot of interesting initial work with computers in music, computers generating music…but the first time an individual could just go buy a computer and program anything they wanted on it without being connected to one of those institutions was when I got into it in 1977.”

When the microcomputer came on the market, it opened the door to composers like Bischoff who were more interested in live collaboration and performance than the solitary work of punching cards and coaxing sounds out of machines that took up whole rooms and, of necessity, didn’t make stage appearances. A KIM-1 wouldn’t be able to replicate the quality of sound that a mainframe at Stanford could produce, but that didn’t worry Bischoff. “We didn’t let that low resolution effect us. We just used these small, slow 8-bit microcomputers and made live sounds. And we tried to make the most interesting sounds we could. They were limited because of the power of these small machines, but having it be live was way more important to us than sacrificing that to get a higher fidelity sound.”

Listen to Bischoff explain this score.

And so Bischoff worked, writing programs for these simple computers and creating new sounds. He—or rather he and his machines—joined a band, The League of Automatic Music Composers, and together with Jim Horton, Tim Perkis and others, designed programs and networks that allowed the computers to talk to one another, to influence and play off of the music each was creating individually in real time. Since the music was non-sequential and the details of any particular performance variable, traditional notation was not really useful. Instead, they mapped scores like blueprints (see left), noting how the computers should be connected, what data was being sent out by each machine and how, in turn, it would be interpreted.

And the experimentation coming out of the computer-related industries fed their work—with its equipment, if not its ideology. “Accompanying the emergence of Silicon Valley was this sort of hacker culture,” explains Bischoff. “It wasn’t so much business oriented—you know, the efforts that led to the great accumulation of wealth—this was more like the fringe element where people were just interested in trying to build circuits to do unusual things.”

Though he hasn’t traded in his KIM 1 (it’s still in his studio), Bischoff’s work has evolved alongside the technology. Armed with his laptop and current software, he doesn’t feel very far from what first excited him about making music with a computer—writing programs that create sounds he can interact with in live performance. But recently he’s been working with live performers, and that is changing his approach. “The machines are way more cooperative,” he acknowledges with a laugh. “I’ve been doing electronics for so long, that is one thing I’ve had to get used to in working with players…they don’t behave like the computers do.”

Jason Eckardt is a composer who produces scores of frighteningly complex notation; who counts Schoenberg, Coltrane, Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, and Lachenmann among his primary influences; and who got his start in music as a guitarist in a metal band.

Jason Eckardt Photo by Molly Sheridan Listen Up Tune in to Counterstream Radio at 9 p.m. on December 20 to hear just what kind of music results when you stir in so much energy of influence. If you’re caught up shopping, you can catch a reprise broadcast of the program on December 23 at 3 p.m. while you wrap up your packages and bake your holiday cookies.

“I heard the Jimmy Page solo to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’ and decided that I automatically had to be able to play this some day,” Eckardt explains, pointing out that most kids born in the early ’70s probably had similar aspirations. “Most of my teen years were dedicated to trying to be a rock star.”

A few years later, his ears also got caught up in jazz. But it wasn’t until he was a student at Berklee College of Music that Eckardt began to understand what composers of concert music actually did. This is also when he was first exposed to the sound world that really struck home—Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5.

Eckardt says that once he had a better understanding of what notated composition offered, he knew that’s exactly where he wanted to be working. “One of the frustrations that I had as a jazz musician was that after concerts I always regretted that improvisations didn’t go a little bit better than I had expected. Suddenly I realized with composition that not only could I take all the time I wanted to make these musical ideas as perfect as I could, but also that now I could play all of the instruments virtually and not just be limited to the guitar.”

That’s not to say that he felt the urge to trade in his previous training. The energy and forcefulness of rock music and the intricacy and improvisational feel of jazz have stuck with him, even if his technical language and his music’s structural underpinnings are more closely aligned with modern composition. “I think that those three things really combine in my music to give me what I consider to be my core musical identity,” though he admits that it might not be immediately apparent on the surface.

“All of these things really combined for me in a really powerful package of musical expression that I felt that I’d been searching for all of my life,” he explains. “When I heard that Webern piece, I immediately knew that I wanted to be a composer; there was no debate or deliberation in my own mind.”

Eckardt has since picked up a doctorate in composition from Columbia University, a host of awards and commissions, and co-founded Ensemble 21, a contemporary music performance group which has more than 30 premieres to its credit—a few of them works by Eckardt himself. For all of the advantages that having a group of close colleagues perform your work over the years offers, however, he says that was never their focus. Rather they were looking at the work of ensembles like Bang on a Can and Sequitur and hoping to fill in a repertoire gap they saw in the New York City music scene in the early 1990s.

And though they do play the occasional Eckardt composition, he says that as a composer he actually learns a lot more when they’re playing somebody else’s music. “I’ve learned much, much more from sitting in on rehearsals of other people’s pieces where the musicians really say what they think, and aren’t on their best behavior because the composer is there, than any orchestration class that I ever took in school.”

Pianist and composer Michael Djupstrom may have been born in 1980, but don’t come to his work expecting trendy, genre-bending, “I want my MTV!” sonic pop-culture references.

“Well, we didn’t have cable,” Djupstrom teases. He also didn’t have musician-parents to guide him, and his own conservative classical training was provided by the public school system and the town’s local organist—largely revolving around Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Though he had plenty of opportunity to expand his listening while earning his undergrad and graduate degrees at the University of Michigan, in the end he came back to a fairly straight-ahead style of composing music.

Michael Djupstrom Photo by Molly Sheridan Listen Up Hug your grandma, eat your turkey, and then tune in to Counterstream Radio at 9 p.m. on November 22, when Djupstrom will tell us more about his approach to writing music and share concert performances of his work. If the tryptophan puts you to sleep before the show, don’t worry—you can catch a reprise broadcast of the program on November 25 at 3 p.m. Listen to a sample of the interview right now.

“When I was a student, I was deliberately trying to stretch boundaries a lot and experimenting,” he explains. “But honestly, I think just in terms of the music that I respond immediately to as a listener, as a performer, as a musician, is music that’s more traditional, frankly.”

Djupstrom, who is now facing the very traditional problem of being a young composer and performer picking up a variety of jobs while establishing himself, says that he appreciates the many musical roles he plays. “I wouldn’t be the kind of person who can sit in a room all day long and compose and compose and compose, let’s say ten hours a day—or even six hours a day—every single day. And if I didn’t have some other aspect of my musical life that kept me so busy, I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.”

When he is at work on a piece, collaborative ventures keep him from feeling isolated. Djupstrom has found himself to be a particular fan of text setting, which allows him to step into a world created by another artist. “The fact that a piece [of poetry] is finished usually suggests a lot of things to you when you’re trying to set it to music,” he says. The challenges of working with such a fixed object can provide inspiration, but it can also be painfully limiting. Djupstrom stumbled upon the ideal combination while paired with the poet Michelle Deatrick in a workshop setting. “I remember when I was composing it, I couldn’t get a certain stanza to work—I just couldn’t do it…it sounded great when you read it, but every time I’d try and compose it, the climax needed to come now, but I still had another stanza to get out of the way.”

So he called her up. “I said, ‘You know, Michelle, can we just cut that?’ And she thought yeah, okay, that’s fine. And it was that easy.”

The process is not always so effortless.

“This summer I did a Neruda setting and there was a stanza I really wanted to cut,” Djupstrom admits. “But he couldn’t be reached.”

“I should probably tell you, I don’t really like talking about my music,” Anna Clyne shyly confesses partway through our interview. The British-born, New York-based composer is laughing and gamely trying to answer my questions, but the whole exercise is clearly starting to wear her out.

Anna Clyne Photo courtesy of the composer Listen to a sample of her interview on Counterstream Radio.

“It’s a strange thing when you put something out there,” she explains. “I’m in the middle of a piece right now, and when you’re writing, you’re absolutely in that world. For me, every part of me is in that piece. So it’s a very concentrated period of time when I’m writing. And then that’s it; I move on and I give the same commitment and energy to the next piece. So it’s interesting to have this conversation, to be reflecting back on these other pieces and to actually see that there is a common thread going. But generally I’m not really a backwards thinker. I’m more of a ‘what’s coming next’.”

Clyne (b. 1980), who picked up a bachelor of music degree with honors from Edinburgh University and a master of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music, has capitalized on that forward-looking focus, successfully exploring and integrating electronic, small ensemble, and full-orchestra sound palettes in a range of situations—from collaborations with choreographer Kitty McNamee and her Hysterica Dance Company to reading sessions with the Minnesota Orchestra and commissions from Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Though you might say that Clyne’s deft hand at writing for electro-acoustic combinations is what sets her apart, the mix of sounds has always worked quite naturally in her ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of electronics and acoustic music as being two separate things,” she says. “I think sometimes I’ll lean more to one side—it could be the extreme being tape and the other side being an orchestra—but when you’re composing, you’re painting with sounds. So if it’s in ProTools with samples or it’s on a score with instruments, to me, I treat it the same way. It’s a visual representation of sound. So, for me, they’re really not that different, and they’re both really exciting.”

Admittedly, though, facing 80 people on a stage is quite different from rows of multi-colored tracks on a computer screen. “Definitely, a huge learning curve because [when working with an orchestra] you have to be as specific as you can be, and there’s very little time for editing. The luxury of electronic music is that you can really have 100 percent control. With the orchestra, you really have to know what you want.”