Con Fuoco: A Podcast about Classical Music and its Future

How can classical musicians balance their identities as people and as musicians? with Lainie Fefferman

December 16, 2020 Daniel Cho Season 1 Episode 15
Con Fuoco: A Podcast about Classical Music and its Future
How can classical musicians balance their identities as people and as musicians? with Lainie Fefferman
Show Notes

Loving the idiosyncratic and the zany, Lainie Fefferman is a composer, performer, and experimenter in the performative application of emergent music technologies. Her most recent commissions have been from Tenth Intervention, So Percussion, Make Music NY, Experiments in Opera, ETHEL, Kathleen Supové, TILT Brass, James Moore, Eleonore Oppenheim, JACK Quartet, and Dither. Her one-woman voice & electronics feminist song performance project "White Fire," an electroacoustic meditation on the heroines of the Hebrew Bible, premiered at Merkin Hall in 2016 and she has been touring it internationally ever since. She is a co-founder and director of New Music Gathering, an annual conference/festival hybrid event for the international New Music Community. She got her doctorate in composition from Princeton University and is a programming/performing member of Princeton-based laptop ensemble Sideband. She is currently a professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology and recently concluded her time as artist in residence at Nokia Bell Labs.

The Question of the Week is, "How can classical musicians balance their identities as people and as musicians?" Lainie and I discuss the dichotomy of living in the classical music world during the twenty-first century, why she likes to include fun facts about herself in her biography, how she thinks about audiences during her compositional process, and how she would define a happy, healthy, and balanced musician. 

You can find out more about Lainie on her website, lainiefefferman.com, and on Instagram @lainiebobainie.