School of Music

Anna Webber (b. 1984) is a New York-based flutist, saxophonist, and composer whose interests and work live the overlap between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. Webber’s latest album is the follow-up to her critically-acclaimed release Clockwise, which the Wall Street Journal called "visionary and captivating" and NPR described as “heady music [that] appeal to the rest of the body.” Idiom is a series of six pieces, each of which is based on a specific woodwind extended technique -- a broad term meaning any non-traditional way of producing sound on an instrument, including the use of multiphonics, alternate fingerings, key clicks, overblown notes, and the like -- that she has taken from her own improvisational language. In 2017, Webber received a New York Foundation for the Arts Canadian Women Artists’ Award, and in 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Award for her work in music composition.

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Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser is one of the most acclaimed creative artists of his times, both for his music and his writings. For the last five decades, Mr. Smith has been a member of the historical and legendary AACM collective. He distinctly defines his music as “Creative Music.” Mr. Smith’s diverse discography reveals a recorded history centered around important issues that have impacted his world. From 1994 he was on the faculty at The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts. There he was the director of the African-American Improvisational Music program. Mr. Smith retired from CalArts in 2013.

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Marijke is a Senior User Experience Designer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On-lab her projects include designing augmented reality tools for spacecraft engineering and Mars exploration, and designing processes and software to support spacecraft operations for the Europa Clipper mission; a spacecraft set to arrive at the Jovian moon in 2025. Off-lab Marijke is a creative technologist who explores ways to use emerging technologies technologies and science to builds non-traditional electronic instruments and software.  She holds a MS from NYU’s School of Engineering, and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

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As a composer and performer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, Sarah Davachi's work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and simple harmonic structures that emphasize subtle variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and temperament and intonation.  The instrumentation she employs is varied, including electric organ, pipe and reed organ, tape-replay samplers, voice, analog synthesizers, piano, and both modern and early strings, brass, and woodwinds.  Similarly informed by minimalist and long-form tenets, baroque leanings toward slow-moving chordal suspension, and experimental production practices of the recording studio environment, in her sound is manifest an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions and apprehensions of the familiar and the distant. 

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Asher Hartman is a transgender writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feeling. A great deal of his work was developed with the support of Machine Project, Los Angeles from 2010-2017.

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Victoria Keddie is an artist working in experiential media, with a focus on transmission and broadcast. Keddie’s work and research explore the choreography between the human body and the tools built for televisual production and electromagnetic signal generation, incorporating the earliest machinery used for sound and video transmission with emerging immersive and virtual-based technologies.

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Since making her debut with the 2008 album Tea Bye Sea, Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Becca Stevens has tested the limits of musical identity, mining everything from jazz to Irish folk to indie-rock in her striving for complete and authentic expression. In her latest musical endeavor—WONDERBLOOM—the North Carolina-bred, Brooklyn-based artist again defies all expectation, this time dreaming up a groove-heavy, dance-ready sound infused with elements of pop and funk and R&B. But despite its brighter textures and uptempo rhythms, WONDERBLOOM finds Stevens achieving a profound complexity in her lyrics, ultimately redefining what’s possible in creating music that elevates and edifies. 

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