School of Music

Ellen Arkbro is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony. Her work includes compositions for acoustic instruments and for synthetic sound, and for combinations of both, as well as installation work. She has presented her site-specific work at Barbican in London, Kölner Philharmonie, Serralves in Porto, Issue Project Room in New York, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, Silent Green in Berlin, Ina GRM in Paris and Tempelaukkio Kirke in Helsinki. In all of her work, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.

Photo: Lieve Kleeven

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. Currently, her practice includes live performance, recordings, audio-visual installations, sound design, and scores for orchestra and chamber music concerts. Block's studio pieces often combine field recordings, electronic sounds, electric organ, piano and long chamber music passages. She composes scores for ensemble, orchestra, pipe organ and piano. Her recordings are published on Another Timbre, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. Block performs using various techniques and instruments. She plays improvised and composed pieces on synth organ, laptop, analog synth, amplified objects, inside of grand piano and microphone, among other materials. Block creates multi-channel diffusion concerts and site-specific, multi-channel sound installations. She recently completed a 14-channel sound installation featuring sounds from Harry Bertoia's "Sonambient” sculptures for the Nasher Sculpture Gallery in Dallas, Texas.

Steve Cardenas, the 2022 Charlie Haden Artist in Residence at CalArts, has performed and recorded with many well-known and highly esteemed musicians. Notably, he was a longstanding member of the Paul Motian Electric Bebop Band, Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra, Steve Swallow Quintet and Joey Baron’s Killer Joey. Steve is currently a member of the John Patitucci Electric Guitar Quartet, Jon Cowherd Mercy Project, Adam Nussbaum Lead Belly Project and Ben Allison Band. Steve has also performed regularly with such artists as Madeleine Peyroux, Eliane Elias and Norah Jones, as well as toured extensively performing at countless international music festivals, theaters, and clubs. Steve has six recordings as a leader, as well as appears as a sideman on over 100 recordings. His most recent albums, “Healing Power - the music of Carla Bley” and “Blue Has a Range,” are on Sunnyside Records. Additionally, Steve is on faculty at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York and is also co-author with editor Don Sickler of the Thelonious Monk Fakebook, Hal Leonard Publishing.

Photo: Anna Yatskevich

Edward Gordon/LARAAJI is a musician, multi-instrumentalist, mystic, and laughter meditation practitioner based in New York City. He attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington D.C. on a scholarship to study composition and piano. LARAAJI’S experiments and explorations with the open tuned electric autoharp/zither began with a gentle nudge from his divine guidance. In 1976, in Queens, NY, he had gone into a pawn shop to trade his guitar for much-needed cash, but was guided to instead acquire the autoharp/zither in the store window. Heeding this mystical and startling guidance, he left the shop with a Kentucky BlueGrass instrument he had never touched before. Within a few weeks, LARAAJI had discovered a new sound vocabulary with this 36-stringed American folk instrument. After open-minded experimentation with altered tunings, LARAAJI arrived at a deeply engaging and exotic new age music performance sound, which he sometimes refers to as “Celestial Vibration,” recalling an earlier paranormal sound hearing experience. LARAAJI began studying Eastern mysticism and improvising trance-inducing jams on his modified autoharp, processed through various electronic effects. In 1979, Brian Eno saw LARAAJI playing in Washington Square Park, NYC and invited him to record an album for his seminal ambient series “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance,” released 1980. Since then, LARAAJI has recorded over 50 solo and collaborative albums, the latest of which are three solo piano improvisation LPs, SUN PIANO, MOON PIANO & THROUGH LUMINOUS EYES. He also conducts healing laughter playshops around the world.