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Biography
Open your mouth and sing. It's one of the most vulnerable and powerful ways we humans have of expressing ourselves. Our songs pass on histories, wind fantastic tales and share things too subtle to convey in any other medium. We use songs to woo, to mourn, to celebrate, to rally and to connect. A great song, no matter the genre, is a braid of words, sound and intention. The older I get, the more personal my music becomes and the more I am committed to the craft of song.
The songs I write sit on the border between popular music and art song. Where exactly, depends on the subject matter and on the musical language of the performers I'm working with. I've never worried that 'one kind' of audience won't understand the 'other kind' of song. Every listener has their own musical reference points, but I've always found people across the (hypothetical) divide to be incredibly open-minded and generous listeners. There is only one kind of audience… human.
I started out as a student of classical violin – an intensive and single-minded pursuit, at least in the high-pressured way I was introduced to it. It suited me. I loved the focus, the challenging music, the community of obsessive nerds, and the incredible expressiveness and clarity it demanded.
In the midst of my conservatory experience, I got the itch to create my own music. I discovered the vast world of improvisation – a practice I return to over and over again at different points in my life, with extraordinarily different results. I explored the world of musique concrète and sound design. That too, has extended into my writing today… the idea of looking for the right sound, not just the right instrument.
When I moved to the Bay Area, for many years, I said yes to everything… I played in bands, I sang, improvising and composed in a dizzying array of contexts. For 15 years, I lived an exciting, but eventually unsustainable life as a touring musician. That experience gave me some great skills: I learned how to travel in the most luxurious style to the most punk rock style, and to prioritize clarity/expression regardless of genre/venue. I learned how to sing with total conviction, how to make an old song new night after night, how to use my violin and voice as much more than pretty melody instruments. I learned to deepen my own expressive language far beyond anything I'd previously imagined.
After many blurry years of travel, I began to take what I'd learned from so many collaborations and focus it into a larger vision of my own, with an understanding that my best resources are the people I work and play with.
My song-writing falls into 2 basic categories: Individual songs that stand on their own, and long-form song cycles. In the first category is most of my songwriting for my own bands/collaborations, both past and present (Rabbit Rabbit, Tin Hat, 2 Foot Yard, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Book of Knots) as well as a few commissions: A Gathering Storm (for the Paul Dresher Ensemble and Amy X Neuberg), A Woman's Body (for NY Festival of Song) and Herring Run (for the San Francisco Girls Chorus).
In the second category sits my first full-length piece called Necessary Monsters (written with poet Rafael Osés), At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire (for the International Contemporary Ensemble plus me), Pandæmonium (for ROVA Saxophone Quartet), and Black Inscription – a multi-media song cycle about the ocean written with Matthias Bossi and Jeremy Flower that I co-directed with fellow-creator Mark DeChiazza.
These larger projects let me explore a single idea from multiple angles. I love this format of a set of songs linked by single subject because I can let the ideas I'm exploring be as complex and kaleidoscopic as they truly are: Necessary Monsters, based on entries from Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, looks at facets of human nature as seen through the creatures we imagine. At Night We Walk in Circles… explores the world of dreams by setting imagery given to me by the musicians themselves. Pandæmonium describes different personal perspectives on the introduction of the machine into people's lives in the 17th-19th Centuries.
Black Inscription explores our relationship with the ocean as seen through the eyes of a mythologized version of the record-setting free diver Natalia Molchanova, who disappeared on a dive off the coast of Spain in 2015, never to return. We took our initial inspiration for this piece both from Molchanova's poetry about diving and from the remarkable writings of Rachel Carson, who described the line of micro plants found universally wherever sea meets rock, as the black inscription. (For more information about this piece, go to BlackInscription.com.)
In addition to the albums of my various bands and projects (see the discography page), I've had a wonderful time making records with Fred Frith, Ben Goldberg, Jeremy Flower, Tom Waits, Mr. Bungle, Tracy Chapman, Pretty Lights, Carla Bozulich and Madeleine Peyroux, sometimes singing, sometimes violinning, and sometimes both. As a singer, I've found myself at the center of a wonderful trend of expansive song cycles that effortlessly blend genres: Jeremy Flower's The Real Me (2016), Ben Goldberg's Orphic Machine (2015), and the live version of Sarah Kirkland-Snider/Ellen McLaughlin's Penelope. I'm on the faculty of both the New England Conservatory's Contemporary Improvisation Department, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts' MFA in Music Composition program.
There are no productions for this artist in the Season Schedule of Performances which currently only dates back to 1991.
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Artist Information
All information is derived from OPERA America's Season Schedule of Performances and titles databases which date back to 1991. OPERA America is constantly updating this data. If you feel that a work or an artist has been omitted or that information is incorrect, please use the linked forms below. Title Information Form Artist Information Form
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