SoundLives

Growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania, where people were often afraid to express their real feelings, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė discovered early on that music was safer than language and that it could enable her to express her innermost feelings without self censoring. It ultimately led her on the path to becoming a composer whose music is performed all over the world.  Although Žibuoklė now divides her time between a democratic Lithuania and the United States, her formative experiences have led her to explore a sonic vocabulary, which though frequently inspired by nature and always deeply emotive, is completely abstract and open to multiple interpretations. This hour-long conversation with Frank J. Oteri also features excerpts from eight different pieces of Žibuoklė's music. Learn more about her and read a complete transcript of the conversation on NewMusicBox: https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/zibuokle-martinaityte-unexplainable-places/

inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. In her conversation with Frank J. Oteri, she likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people performing them. And in the last few years inti's music has been championed by an extremely wide range of musicians from Roomful of Teeth to Ensemble Dal Niente to the Kronos Quartet.

Brandee Younger has carved out a very unlikely music career for herself, a classically-trained harpist who went from making her jazz debut over a decade ago to being an in-demand leader and collaborator in a wide range of musical genres. How she has transformed this instrument seems without precedent. But a huge role model for her was Dorothy Ashby, a jazz and later R&B harpist and composer who, in the years since her death, has become one of the recording artists most heavily sampled on hip-hop tracks. Brandee Younger's latest album, Brand New Life, plays tribute to Dorothy Ashby, by taking her poly-stylistic inclinations even further.

The story of Tina Davidson's life, which is the basis of her newly published memoir Let Your Heart Be Broken, is extremely intense but also a rewarding reading experience just like the emotional roller coaster rides in so many of her musical compositions make for very compelling listening. She explained to Frank J. Oteri in this conversation recorded in March 2023 that "when you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable." In addition to talking about the book, they also talk about many of Tina's musical compositions and the podcast includes excerpts from seven of them.

Composer Kevin Puts takes pride in keeping secrets, both by being understated in his interactions with people and by never initially giving away all the goods in his music, preferring, as he tells Frank J. Oteri, "to keep something in reserve so that there's a payoff for the attentive listener." But in their hour-long conversation, he'll reveal some of the secrets behind The Hours (his Metropolitan Opera debut), and Contact (his triple concerto for Time for Three which just won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition), and much more. Read more at NewMusicBox: newmusicusa.org/nmbx/kevin-puts-keeping-secrets/

The new music community has been impacted, inspired and transformed by Tania León as a musical creator--as well as an interpreter, educator, and organizer--for decades. In the last two years, the rest of the world has caught up with her. In 2021, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her extraordinary orchestral composition Stride which was given its world premiere performance by the New York Philharmonic just a few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic reached New York City. And in December 2022, she was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors along with George Clooney, Amy Grant, Gladys Knight, and the four members of the Irish rock band U2; to mark the occasion all were greeted at The White House by U.S. President Joe Biden. Back in 1999, Tania León was the very first composer featured in a one-on-one conversation for NewMusicBox; with this new SoundLives podcast recorded more than 23 years later, she is the first person ever so featured twice!

Elena Ruehr’s prolific output is a by-product of her maintaining a consistent composing schedule (five hours every day from Noon to 5:00pm) as well as her never-ending inspiration from the visual arts and her constant reading (four books a week), plus her desire to communicate with listeners. As she explained to Frank J. Oteri in this hour-long conversation about her music which features excerpts of nine of her compositions, "It's all about turning emotion into sound. As far as I'm concerned, that's my job; that's what I do."

Victoria Shen's needle nails technique, which was appropriately earlier this summer in a Beyoncé video, is just one of many new approaches to making sounds that Shen (who performs under the moniker Evicshen) uses in her provocative performances and installations. But even though all the sounds she makes, and often all the devices she uses to make them as well, are her own creations, she is ambivalent about describing herself as a composer as she tells Frank J. Oteri in this NewMusicBox podcast. To learn more about Shen and to see as well as hear more of her work, please visit NewMusicBox: https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/victoria-shen-the-landfill-of-meaning/

While the idiosyncratic graphic scores of 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning composer Raven Chacon are stunningly original in their conception and have been recognized as works of visual art in their own right (several are in this year's Whitney Biennial), they have a larger social purpose. WARNING: A little bit after the 44 minute mark in this hour-long podcast there is an excerpt of a musical performance involving shotguns.

For Anthony Davis, whose compositional aesthetics are an amalgamation of several different musical traditions (jazz, Western classical music, gamelan), different kinds of music recall different emotional states and experiences in terms of what the music implies. So it's inevitable that he has devoted so much of his compositional energies to opera, and in particular to using the operatic medium to tell stories that either deal with significant historic events or which focus on important social concerns. As he tells Frank J. Oteri in this latest episode of NewMusicBox's SoundLives podcast, "What we face now ... has made it more urgent for me, as an artist, to present things to challenge those forces." Read more on NewMusicBox: https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/anthony-davis-any-means-necessary/.