Christine Southworth

Christine Southworth (b. 1978), through her work with robots and automated music systems as co-founder and Director of Ensemble Robot, is making groundbreaking music based on the interaction between technology and creativity. Compared to Thurston Moore (Boston Phoenix, 2/11/05) and Laurie Anderson (Boston Globe, 2/4/05), Southworth is introducing a brand new genre of music to Boston, born out of the area’s complex community of scientists and artists. Her February 2005 performance of Zap! overfilled the Boston Museum of Science’s Theater of Electricity with an energized crowd of 500 students, professors, artists, children, and adults. The Boston Phoenix called the show “truly electrifying,” describing that “Ever since Bob Dylan, ‘going electric’ has had many connotations, but this was something different: though Zap! utilized the talents of a flutist, two keyboardists, a cellist, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a vocalist, a double-helix-shaped robotic xylophone, sound engineers, and computer programmers, the centerpiece of Southworth’s performance was electricity itself, as millions of volts buzzed, fizzled, and sparked in deafening cracks that punctuated her music.” (Will Spitz, Boston Phoenix) Southworth received a B.S. from MIT in 2002 in mathematics and music and M.A. in Computer Music & Multimedia Composition from Brown University in 2006. She composes for Western ensembles, Balinese gamelan, and mixed ensembles of gamelan, western instruments, electronics, and robots. Her compositions draw from her interests in modern American and European music, jazz, Balinese music, and rock and roll, and have received awards and recognition from the LEF Foundation, American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), the MIT Eloranta Fellowship, and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music. Her compositions have been played by Gamelan Galak Tika, Ethel, Bang on a Can, Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings, Alarm Will Sound, the NEC Wind Ensemble, and Ensemble Robot, at venues including the Boston Museum of Science, Mass MoCA, Jordan Hall, MIT, Wesleyan University, and in Bali, Indonesia. For more information, please visit Christine's website, www.kotekan.com Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.