On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer, performer, and educator Brittany J. Green.

Brittany's music works to create intimate, collaborative musical spaces at the intersection of sound, video, movement, and text — described by the Washington Post as "a creative force of attention-seizing versatility" and by the Chicago Classical Review as "cinematic in the best sense." Her recent work engages sonification and Black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW series, and Miller Theater, with collaborators including Alarm Will Sound, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and JACK Quartet. She holds a Ph.D from Duke University and teaches composition and music theory at East Carolina University.

In this conversation, Brittany traces a path from a family friend's piano to a clarinet piece about the rock cycle written in sixth grade, through a music education degree, a master's at East Carolina where she fell into the deep end of composition for the first time, and a doctorate at Duke — arriving at a practice where composing, theorizing, teaching, and advocacy are all expressions of the same central question: what can music actually do? They talk about Black feminist theory not as a theme but as a structural methodology — a way of embedding the politics into the formal behavior of the music itself, down to every fiber. They discuss whether a piece of music can be a form of political action rather than just representing one, the DIY music scenes of Durham and Louisville as radical experimental spaces hiding in plain sight, silence as an active compositional element rather than an absence, narration as a rhythmic voice within the ensemble, and the experience of developing a compositional voice — and then trying to get lost again.

Learn more about Brittany and her music on her website: https://www.brittanyjgreen.com/

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