19552 GW Mag 26_Final_singles - Flipbook - Page 38
Helping Students
Find Their Voice
Associate Professor of
Music Heather Stebbins
(Photo: Farrah Skeiky)
A performer, composer and educator, Associate Professor of Music Heather Stebbins
gives students tools to capture experience, memory and meaning through sound.
HEATHER STEBBINS GREW UP SOUNDTRACKED BY A
lush and unusual orchestra. Inside her childhood home,
a farmhouse surrounded by forests in Maryland’s Patapsco
State Park, her musical family played the piano, violin and
other instruments. Outside their windows, the symphony
expanded. Trees rustled and whispered, a literal woodwind
section. Birdsong rose and fell with the flocks’ migratory
patterns. Trains on the nearby B&O Railroad rattled a
percussive backbeat.
“Ever since I was a child, I really have been moved
by sound,” Stebbins said.
Stebbins is now an associate professor of music at
the CCAS Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. As an
educator, composer and electronic musician, she helps
students think about sound not only as an artistic medium
but also as the material of experience, memory and meaning.
“A sound connects us to a very specific place or time, so
there’s a lot of nostalgia imbued within it,” she said. “I often
work with field recordings or recordings of commonplace
sounds or specific environments because it has the ability to
evoke something beyond what, say, a melody played on a
flute could do.”
That’s not to knock the flute. Stebbins’ own formal
musical education began at age 6, when she started cello
lessons. She loved the weight of the instrument, the way its
vibration created “an embodiment of sound,” its similarity
in range and tone to the human voice.
As a first-year student at the University of Richmond, she
opted into a class called Computer Music, thinking it would
teach her recording techniques she could use to land a coveted
job at the campus recording studio. However, the course was
actually focused on how to generate and manipulate sounds
38 | www.columbian.gwu.edu
with the computer. “My very first composition experiences
were not writing for other [musicians] but writing for a
machine and playback,” Stebbins said.
The course and Stebbins’ professor, Benjamin Broening,
would change the course of her life and career. Broening was
a founder of the Third Practice Electro-Acoustic Music Festival,
where Stebbins began working as a tech specialist. There,
she experienced music that incorporated both acoustic and
electronic elements—often using interactive electronics, where
audio input was processed and played back in real time.
“It introduced me to a lot of living composers, which was
not something that I was even aware of because growing up
and playing a Western classical instrument, you often play
the music of dead white men,” Stebbins said. “It was really
fascinating to see what composition meant in the early 21st
century, and what sort of technologies people were using to
expand the palette of sounds available to them.”
A “Non-Musical” Musician
That expanded palette shapes her own approach as
an active performer and composer. Stebbins’ works use
sounds created by instruments, found objects, nature and
even voltage. They range in form from notated works for
chamber ensembles to improvised performances on
modular synthesizers.
“Most of what I do is a combination of working with sounds
that I’ve recorded, many of these being non-musical, and
processing them either sort of on the computer beforehand
or in real time using technology,” she said.
Stebbins performs often, including at area art space
Rhizome DC and on the National Mall as part of the
free “Modular on the Mall” concert series. One “guided
