Essays & Articles

  • An hour-long ZOOM interview with UCSB students December 2022
    An hour-long ZOOM interview with UCSB students December 2022
  • My Music Is My Memoir
    Although I was writing music for friends and myself from the time I was seven, I never consciously considered becoming a composer. Throughout my training – from the Juilliard Prep through graduate school at Columbia – I was told, explicitly (since that was the attitude of the time,) that a woman could not aspire ...
  • Releasing the Caged Bird
    Completing a Work Last week I completed a piece. Just days ago, I was absorbed in its compositional momentum and its specific sounds, sonorities so sweet and compelling I’d hear them in bed each morning waking me up. That piece – the Caged Bird piece – is to be sung by 75 children along with French ...
  • While Hope Remains: Envisioning the music
    A Composer’s Response to 9/11 Winter didn’t need to come this year; New York was already bleak under October’s continuing cloudless sky. Not waiting for snow, we were waiting for smallpox, for nuclear clutter, for plagues we’d only read about in history and in cattle. Our shared world suffused with recurrent panic, dread and disillusionment; my interior ...
  • Eldridge Street Synagogue
    A Site-specific Notion Auditory landscapes are most evocative for me, evocative of people’s lives and practices, and of moods. So silence in the sanctuary of one of the oldest, most historic houses of worship in New York, the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, troubles me. The site has been restored to habitability and ...