News / Announcements

Greetings and welcome! You will find descriptions of scores and recordings, status of current projects, and other informative aspects of my music on this site. My creative pursuits revolve around the heightened awareness of elements that combine, collide, and careen around contemporary opera; the theatrical resonance potentials in the context of concert performance; and the latent value of surrealist philosophy when applied to composition and performance. Courses that I teach at CalArts, such as HyperOpera, Concert Theater, and Surrealism and Music, have emerged from these topics.  As the content for this site grows and broadens in scope, it will include details about these courses, cultivated during thirteen years of teaching.  My current compositional and analytical inquiries will also be shared, with detours into notation for extended harp techniques, as well as obsessions such as chess, magical realism, the paintings of Remedios Varo, and the effect of scent on cognitive processes.

“The wind blows hard among the pines toward the beginning of an endless past. Listen: you’ve heard everything.” (Shinkichi Takahashi)

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As March rolls around, Out with baroque ruins invoked by four, a new work performed with poetic finesse by violinist Anthea Kreston on March 5 in New York (thanks, Anthea, what a beautiful concert), and In with the ephemera of memory conjured in Southern Ephemera ---a paean to my childhood in the South. Rarely performed, Southern Ephemera was commissioned in the early 90’s by Newband, an ensemble that toured and recorded the piece. The iconic American composer Harry Partch invented two of the four instruments used in the composition: Harmonic Canon and Surrogate Kithara (rounded out by flute and cello). The LA-based ensemble Partch performs Southern Ephemera on June 2 and 3 at REDCAT…with a brand new Surrogate Kithara, now being built. The piece is an ode to the distortion of memory---namely my own, particularly my childhood in the South. By scoring the piece with a tuning system dividing the octave into 43 discrete tones, a system favored by Harry Partch,  I wanted to create an intonation mechanism that, in its implicit ‘distortion’ of 12-tone equal tempered tuning, becomes the medium and the underlying message.

Right around the corner---in mid-March, the 16th---I’ll be performing on harp, with two dynamite string players, Ronit Kirchman and Torsten Müller. Our concert of duo and trio improvisations takes place at 8 PM at the Wild Beast, the new performing space at CalArts. Ronit and I first met when we both performed at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin in 2003. We get together and play from time to time, always a joy to collaborate with her, and with Torsten as well, who comes down from Vancouver.  If you’re anywhere near Santa Clarita, please join us for the concert!

Finally, thanks to Mark Menzies for his riveting performances of fore (for violin, it shares DNA with four)in Alaska and in Valencia last month.

Anne LeBaron and Mark Menzies

Mark Robson, pianist, and Timur Bekbosunov, tenor, after their concert at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C. on December 9, 2009. The program included the first public performance of excerpts from The Silent Steppe Cantata, arranged for piano and tenor: "Black of My Eye," and "I am a Kazakh." The concert was sponsored by the Embassy of Kazakhstan.