Anne LeBaron

Alice Anne LeBaron (born May 30, 1953) is an American composer and harpist.

LeBaron was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Her development of a new performance vocabulary for the instrument began in the early 1970s, when she played in the Alabama improvising ensemble Trans Museq along with Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith.

Her career as an improviser has included performance collaborations with such creative composer/musicians as Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Evan Parker, George E. Lewis, Derek Bailey, Leroy Jenkins, Lionel Hampton, and Shelley Hirsch.

She holds a B.A. in music from the University of Alabama (1974), an M.A. in music from Stony Brook University (1978), and a doctorate in music from Columbia University (1989), where she studied with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky.

Although trained in piano from childhood, she took up the harp in college; in 1974 and 1976, she studied privately with Alice Chalifoux at the Salzedo Harp Colony.

Theater has played an important role in LeBaron's music, with such scores as Concerto for Active Frogs (1974) for voices, three instruments, and tape, and the harp solos I Am an American ... My Government Will Reward You (1988) and Hsing (2002).

Her awards include an ASCAP Foundation Grant and a BMI Student Composer Award (1979), the GEDOK International Prize in Mannheim (1982), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1991–1992), the Alpert Award in the Arts (1996–1997), a Cultural Exchange International Grant in 2009 from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for The Silent Steppe Cantata (2011), and the Toulmin Grant from Opera America (2014).

LeBaron's composition in instrumental, electronic, and performance realms embraces a wide range of media and styles.

As a Fulbright Scholar in 1980–81, she studied with Mauricio Kagel and György Ligeti LeBaron has also studied Korean traditional music at the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul (1983).

Among her multi-cultural compositions are Lamentation/Invocation (1984) for baritone and three instruments, using Korean-derived gestures and long sustained tones for the voice; Noh Reflections (1985) for string trio, which draws upon the music of Japanese Noh theater; Breathtails (2012) for baritone, string quartet, and Japanese shakuhachi; and her large-scale celebration of Kazakhstan, The Silent Steppe Cantata (2011) for tenor Timur Bekbosunov, women's chorus, and an orchestra of traditional Kazakh instruments, premiered at Congress Hall in Astana.

Writing about LeBaron's 1989 Telluris Theoria Sacra (for flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and piano), musicologist Susan McClary notes that the work "...points to LeBaron's more pervasive interest in music's ability to mold temporality, immersing the listener in a sound world in which time bends, stands still, dances, or conforms to the mechanical measure of the clock".

LeBaron served as composer-in-residence in Washington, DC, sponsored by Meet the Composer from 1993 until 1996.

Frequently combining tonal and atonal techniques, she has utilized elements of blues, jazz, pop, rock, and folk music in such scores as the opera The E & O Line (1993), American Icons (1996) for orchestra, and Traces of Mississippi (2000) for chorus, orchestra, poet narrators, and rap artists.

She has also used American literary sources with Devil in the Belfry (1993) for violin and piano, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, and the Gertrude Stein setting Is Money Money (2000) for soprano and chamber ensemble.

She was assistant professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh from 1996 to 2000.

LeBaron's operas The E & O Line, Croak (The Last Frog) (1996), and Wet (2005) were all collaborative works that led her to develop the genre she terms "hyperopera": "an opera resulting from intensive collaboration across all the disciplines essential for producing opera in the 21st century – in a word, a 'meta-collaborative' undertaking".

She has also composed a series of monodramas for female voice and chamber musicians: Pope Joan (2000), Transfiguration (2003), Sucktion (2008), and Some Things Should Not Move (2013).

Beginning in 2001, she was appointed Professor of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, where she has held the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition since 2013.

Prior to the full production of Crescent City, LeBaron composed Phantasmagoriettas from Crescent City, performed by the LOOS Electro Acoustic Media Orchestra and the soloists from Los Angeles during the Dag in de Branding Festival in the Hague in 2007.

As an improviser LeBaron employs a wide array of extended techniques for the harp, including preparing the harp (similar to John Cage's prepared piano) and bowing the strings, as well as a variety of electronic enhancements.

LeBaron's double-CD 1, 2, 4, 3 (Innova 236, 2010) features collaborations with thirteen different musicians in solo, duo, quartet, and trio configurations.

Sources

With her hyperopera Crescent City (2012, libretto by Douglas Kearney), LeBaron went a step beyond the nineteenth-century concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the united/total/universal artwork that synthesized architecture, scenic painting, singing, instrumental music, poetry, drama, and dance), championed by Richard Wagner.

A more lateral, inclusive, and intensive collaboration of artists occurs with hyperopera, breaking down the usual hierarchical structures of traditional opera, which define and limit the roles of individuals on creative and production teams.

The genre of hyperopera involves the collaborations of a diverse group of artists that can portray a variety of meanings or realities.

In the postmodern tradition of redefining opera, also seen in the work of Robert Ashley, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, LeBaron replaced the Wagnerian orchestra with smaller and more specialized forces of instruments and electronic sound for Crescent City, with musicians who move readily among stylistic genres, just as the vocalists do.

The opera's theatrical action is refracted through a prism of video work, lighting effects, and performance freedoms and simultaneities.

For its world premiere production in Los Angeles in 2012, Crescent City also engaged six visual artists to participate in the collaborative process by designing and building set pieces as various locales in the opera.