EC2

In this episode, I chat with Professor Andrew Waggoner. Professor Waggoner is a composer whose vivid, dramatic style has earned praise from The New Yorker as "the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style." His music has been commissioned and performed by major ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, JACK Quartet, Corigliano Quartet, and intern...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Pascal Le Boeuf. Professor Le Boeuf is a GRAMMY-winning composer, jazz pianist, and producer whose music blends improvised performance with chamber writing and technology-driven production. Praised by the New York Times for his sleek, hyper-fluent style, he has been commissioned by ensembles and organizations including Akropolis Reed Quintet, Alarm Will Sound, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and New ...

In this episode, I chat with Professor David S. Lefkowitz. Professor Lefkowitz is a composer, theorist, and professor at UCLA whose music has been performed widely across the United States, Europe, and Asia. His more than 150 works range from solo and chamber pieces to large-scale music for choir, orchestra, and wind ensemble, and his compositions have appeared on over twenty commercial recordings. He has taught composition, orches...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Eran Egozy. Professor Egozy is Professor of the Practice in Music Technology at MIT, an entrepreneur, clarinetist, and technologist best known as co-founder and chief technical officer of Harmonix Music Systems, the company behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which sold over 35 million units worldwide and generated over $1 billion in annual sales. Named in Time Magazine's Time 100 and Fortun...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Jason Yust. Professor Yust is a music theorist and professor at Boston University whose research spans mathematical theories of rhythm and harmonic spaces, Schenkerian analysis, eighteenth-century form, music perception, and scale theory. His 2018 book Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form received the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in 2019, and his articles have appeared ...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Gundula Kreuzer. Professor Kreuzer is a musicologist and Professor at Yale University whose research spans the history and theory of opera, staging technologies, media archaeology, music in the Third Reich, and contemporary experimental opera. Her first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the Ame...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Wolfgang Marx. Professor Marx is Professor of Historical Musicology at University College Dublin and a member of the UCD Humanities Institute, whose research centers on the representation of death in music, György Ligeti, post-truth and music, and the theory of musical genres. He has served multiple terms as Head of the UCD School of Music and has held editorial roles such as the Journal of th...

In this episode, I chat with Mr. Derek David. Mr. David is a composer, conductor, and educator based in Boston whose work spans dramatic chamber, vocal, and orchestral music as well as a deep commitment to Yiddish musical culture. He is currently Lecturer in Music at MIT and serves as musical director and conductor of "A Besere Velt," the largest chorus dedicated to the performance and preservation of Yiddish repertoire. ...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Oscar Bettison. Professor Bettison is a British-American composer and faculty member in the Composition Department at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 2009. Described as possessing "an unconventional lyricism and a menacing beauty," his music bridges the worlds of concert music and beyond, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times,...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Forrest Pierce. Professor Pierce is a composer and Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Kansas whose music blends religious mysticism, contemporary virtuosity, and a deep affinity for the human voice. Sincere, often triadic, and blatantly tuneful, his work draws on non-western traditions, rock-era influences, and common-practice harmony to evoke a world of sacred unity and n...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Kelly Bylica. Professor Bylica is a music education scholar and faculty member at Boston University whose research focuses on curriculum and policy, critical pedagogy, middle school music, and issues of diversity, access, and leadership in music education. Grounded in her experience as a middle school and K-8 general music and choir teacher in Chicago, her work encourages music educators to ch...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Felipe Lara. Professor Lara is a Brazilian-American composer and Associate Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, praised by the New York Times as "a gifted Brazilian-American modernist" whose music possesses "voluptuous, elemental lyricism." A 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his Double Concerto for esperanza spalding, Claire Cha...

In this episode, I chat with Mr. Adam Boyles. Mr. Boyles is a conductor and vocalist who has been a prominent figure in New England's musical life for nearly two decades. He serves as Assistant Conductor of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and Director of Orchestras at MIT, and is Music Director Emeritus of the Brookline Symphony Orchestra. A versatile presence on the podium, Mr. Boyles made his Boston Pops debut in June 2024 st...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Miguel Zenón. Professor Zenón is a Grammy-winning alto saxophonist, composer, and Associate Professor in Music and Theater Arts at MIT, widely regarded as one of the most groundbreaking and influential musicians of his generation. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he has released eighteen recordings as a leader, including the Grammy-winning El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2 (2023) and the Gram...

In this episode, I chat with Mr. Elijah Smith. Mr. Smith is an American composer and electronic musician whose work spans orchestral, chamber, and multimedia genres, marked by dense textures, rhythmic ambiguity, and rich gravitational harmonies. His music has been described as "gnashing and relentless" by the Chicago Tribune, "seductive" by Gramophone, and "an ingenious study in clarity and distortion" by San Francisco Classical Vo...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Dan DiPiero. Professor DiPiero is a musician, writer, and Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University whose research explores affective connections between aesthetics and politics in U.S. improvised and popular music. He is the author of Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press, 2022), a finalist for the International Association for t...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Louis Epstein. Professor Epstein is a historical musicologist specializing in early twentieth-century French music, digital mapping, and the science of teaching and learning. His book The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France examines collaborations between patrons and composers that shaped French classical music between the world wars. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbri...

In this episode, I chat with Professor Colin Roust. Professor Roust is a musicologist and professor at the University of Kansas whose research focuses on twentieth-century music, film music, band music, and the intersections of music, politics, and other arts such as film, opera, and ballet. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has been a leading advocate for music history pedagogy, serving as Chair of the AMS Pedag...

In this episode, I chat with Dr. Sarah Iker. Dr. Iker is a music theorist and lecturer in the Music & Theater Arts section at MIT, where she teaches music theory, music history, aural skills, and seminars on topics such as dance, opera, and musical theater. She holds a Ph.D. in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago and dual B.A. degrees in Piano Performance and Mathematics from Scripps College. Her research fo...