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Bora Yoon - Sound Architect

The idea that resonated most with me from Bora Yoon was her interest in imbuing her music with a sense of transport, where the music can take the listener into a different space and/or time. When I hear new music and I’m alone (and my goal is to listen with an open mind), I often close my eyes – which places me in an inexorably individual and simultaneously infinite space: the space inside my imagination. Whatever memories, ideas, sounds, images, etc. that come up while hearing the song I tend to associate with the song and vice versa. Since Yoon’s goal is to write pieces that evoke specific imagery, she must have a strong understanding of this for herself. Yoon conceives of music as tangible, which motivates her to create pieces that employ imagery of the human experience, nature, and other facets of real life. There can be a tendency for many composers of a certain kind (a kind I believe to be myself) to really lean into the complexity of their musical ideas and they can end up with...
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500 Word Blog Post: Anna Clyne

Anna Clyne One of the most interesting things I found of Anna’s presentation was her use of visualizing her own musical material. She showed as an example of creating a mural for the music using colors, forms, shapes and lines to show how the music evolves and grows. This becomes a sort of visual representation which is an incredibly interesting detail of her compositional process and gives a lot of insight into the piece. Also, as much as the visualizing of the material made it ‘physical’, she also mentioned she drew what the music made her feel which I can imagine as well as being compositionally helpful, also has some therapeutic benefits potentially! For “Night Ferry” it shows the journey of the mind, a highly effective depiction of the swirling thoughts and emotions as captured so beautifully in her piece. She spoke about her background in technology and the ability technological means allow for a layering of texture, and this influence was definitely pre...
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Nico Muhly - Marnie and the Adaptation of Operatic Form

I found Nico Muhly’s presentation to be very transparent and informative on many fronts, but the one that interested me the most was his dive into the process behind his new opera, Marnie. New opera fascinates me particularly in how composers deal with writing within a form and standard practice that has stayed relatively consistent for hundreds of years. Muhly’s approach to form on both large and small scales seems to emphasize the function of the aria. He mentioned that he wanted to avoid “objectification through music” and rather attempted to delve into more philosophical elements of Marnie’s predicaments, rendered particularly legible by the chorus of “past-Marnies” that accompanies her during her ostensibly “private” moments. Through manipulations of standard operatic norms such as the aria and the role of the chorus, Muhly finds room for innovation and transcendence of typical form while working comfortably within the norms of opera. Muhly’s definition of the role o...
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