New York-based composer Katherine Balch has an extraordinary number of things going on in her head at any given time. She has recently completed a piece for a multimedia project by Michiko Theurer, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, to be performed March 13, 2017, in Boulder, Colorado. Currently, Katie is working on two separate orchestral commissions. Over Skype, we discussed a paper she wrote about Rousseau and Montesquieu’s distinct perspectives on the role of theater in shaping social mores, which she presented as an undergraduate at the 2013 Northeastern Political Science Association Conference in Philadelphia. She then told me in animated detail about how the interior mechanics of plants inspire a surprising amount of her compositions, and how a novel by Italo Calvino provides an excellent analogy for understanding contemporary musical structures.
Xylem
An introduction to Katherine Balch
