Katherine Saxon

Like many composers, I have a hard time classifying my music. My unconscious influences undoubtedly include the 20th c. Russian composers that I so enjoyed as a young trumpet player, the vocal music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance I discovered when I started singing, and the 20th c. French and American music I came to love in college. That aside, I often draw inspiration from visual sources, including the Pre-Raphaelites, Japanese animation, and abstract expressionism, as well as literary sources, such as poetry and the genres of fantasy and science fiction. I am fascinated with how these art forms make the normal seem strange and the strange seem normal.

After a sunshine-filled childhood in Santa Monica CA, I decided to move to a place with seasons. I received my B.A. from Williams College in MA, where I studied with Ileana Perez-Velazquez and Brad Wells and experienced beautiful fall, bitter winter and sticky, smoldering summer. For my M.M., I journeyed to the University of Oregon, where I studied with Robert Kyr and David Crumb and learned to enjoy the constant drizzle while revelling in the almost unsightly abundance of spring. Then, I spent an enlightening year working in a music shop in Albany, Georgia, where the best season is peach season, before coming back to mild, sunny California to study with Joel Feigin at U.C. Santa Barbara. My music has been performed in California, Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, Wisconsin, Georgia, Maine, and Pennsylvania as well as Italy, Finland and New Zealand.