Music

Benjamin Piekut

Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University

Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University. His first monograph, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, was...

Tiffany Ng

ARC Fellow, Associate Professor of Carillon, and University Carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Tiffany Ng is an associate professor of carillon and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An energetic advocate of diversity in contemporary music, she has premiered or revived over sixty pieces by emerging and established composers from Augusta Read Thomas to Yvette Janine Jackson, pioneered models for interactive “crowdsourced” carillon performances and environmental-data-driven sound installations with Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Ed Campion, Ken Goldberg, John Granzow, and Laura Steenberge, and through her composer collaborations...

Eli Wirtschafter

2012 ARC Fellow

Eli Wirtschafter is the Program Director for KALW's project in state prisons. We teach incarcerated people how to record and edit audio stories, and air them as part of the series Uncuffed.

Eli graduated from KALW's Audio Academy in 2016. He became KALW's transportation reporter, and also interned with KQED News and The California Report. He's been working in KALW's training programs in prison since 2018.

Eli lived in the East Bay between the ages of seven and 29, and is now...

Myra Melford

Avant-garde Jazz Pianist, Composer, and Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices at UC Berkeley

For nearly two decades, as a Professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices at UC Berkeley, Myra Melford has pursued a philosophy that honors jazz and new-music traditions while emphasizing emerging developments in musical technique, theory, technology and performance.

The pianist, composer, bandleader and professor Myra Melford—whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”—has spent the last three decades making original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Culling inspiration from a wide range of sources including the blues of...

Aja Monet

ARC Fellow, Poet, Writer, Lyricist, and Activist

Born in New York City to parents of Cuban and Jamaican descent and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, Aja Monet Bacquie began writing poems when she was eight or nine years old. While attending Baruch College Campus High School, she performed spoken-word for school talent shows. Around this time, Monet joined Urban Word NYC—a non-profit organization that offers guidance and public platforms to young writers, particularly those of color—and became a part of a community of aspiring urban writers.

At 19, Monet became the youngest winner of Nuyorican...

Trịnh Thị Minh Hà

Filmmaker, Writer, Literary Theorist, Composer, and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley

Originally trained as a musical composer, who received her two masters and Ph.D. from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Trịnh Thị Minh Hà is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women’s work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. She has also taught at Harvard, Smith, Cornell, San Francisco State University, the University of Illinois, Ochanomizu University in Japan, and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. Aside from the eight...

Adel-Jing Wang

Sound Studies Scholar, Art Anthropologist, Curator and Practitioner in Sound Art

Based in Hangzhou, China, Adel-Jing Wang is a sound studies scholar, art anthropologist, curator and practitioner in sound art. She is currently an associate professor of sound studies at Zhejiang University, China and has also served as a visiting scholar at MIT Anthropology(2019-2020) andthe School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong (2017.2). She is the artist in residence at The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia (2022-2023) and founded the Sound Lab at the College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang University (2015-2021). Wang is also the author...

Joan Jeanrenaud

ARC Artist-in-Residence, Cellist, Composer, Arranger, Improviser, and Former Member of the Kronos Quartet

Joan Jeanrenaud is a cellist, composer, arranger, and improviser. She was the cellist of the Kronos Quartet for 20 years. Her work with Kronos included more than 30 recordings and over 2000 performances that took her to virtually every major concert hall worldwide. During those years the group became, in the words of The New York Times critic John Rockwell, "the world's best known, most innovative contemporary-music quartet." Jeanrenaud's cello is a Deconet, ca. 1750. A copy of that cello was carved out of ice and played with "bows" made of saws, barbed wire...

Salon: Ed Campion

November 7, 2011
We had the opportunity to hold another ARC Salon to celebrate the work of UCB faculty composer, Ed Campion, when Cal Performances featured the performance of his work by the stunning Paris-based group Ensemble Zellig. Ed is a leader in the fields of electronic and digital music composition, crafting what are not so much “scores” but alternate “systems” for composing, calibrating, integrating, and synthesizing musical and sonic forms. Cal Performances director, Matías Tarnalpolsky, joined us for a pre-show talk and a post-show reception to help us think about the beauty of Campion’s work...

Yen-Ting Hsu

Sound artist and Composer

Using sound as primary creation medium, Yenting Hsu investigates the cultural context and texture of sounds. Her works often reflect the relationship between sounds, environment, individual and/or collective memories and emotions. Interweaving field recordings with electronic sounds and objects, Hsu keeps exploring and experimenting documentary and fiction / narrative and imaginary elements of recorded sounds. Mixing with other art mediums and artistic disciplines, Hsu creates installations, performances, audio documentaries, electroacoustic music, and more. She also...