We’re looking forward to hearing from Dr Jennie Gottschalk who will deliver the keynote address at this year’s conference. Some may be familiar with her website, Sound Expanse, that documents many experimental music composers, their pieces, and approaches. She has recently published the book Experimental Music Since 1970 with Bloomsbury. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on this area and a much-needed overview of the current field. As a composer, author and music practitioner, Jennie will be drawing on her range of experience to speak to our optional theme of Music and Pattern.

Her current work includes an interview project that aims to give voice to wide range of perspectives on the field of experimental music. Through work as a transcriptionist she says that she has, ‘taken a real interest in what people say, how they say it, and how they relate to each other.’ She is trying to bring this into her work in experimental music, through this series. Experimental Music is historically difficult to define with multiple strands of practice and many different approaches in many different countries and scenes. In an interview, ‘Non-Fictional Music’, for Van Magazine, Gottschalk has reflected on her approach in this work in experimental music. She describes this practice as music that ‘planted me more firmly and consciously in the place where I was’. This evocation of the personal element of writing about music as well as making it is a refreshing an often quite unique part of her work in the area.

Jennie Gottschalk comes from Boston. She holds a bachelor’s degree in composition from The Boston Conservatory (2001), and a master’s degree and doctorate from Northwestern University (2008). Her teachers have included Larry Bell, Yakov Gubanov, Jay Alan Yim, Augusta Read Thomas, and Aaron Cassidy. Her dissertation and current work explore connections between American pragmatist thought and experimental music.

More details of her talk will be published in the run-up to the conference. You can explore her compositions at her personal website.