Darcy Copeland

In a visually dominated world, sound as an immersive, experiential medium offers a means of cultivating connection, place, and presence.

Darcy Copeland is an American experimental composer based in Boston. She writes music to excavate and connect to her internal self and to explore outward expressions of thinking, moving, feeling, and being on a ravaged planet. Working with acoustic instruments, electronics, and visuals, her work interrogates themes of vulnerability, materiality, and affect. She frequently employs the use of oblique and roving experiments of duration, timbre, and texture to create ecosystemic and atmospheric sonic worlds.

She is also an artist-scholar, conducting research within the fields of sound studies, musicology, affect theory, philosophy, new materialism, Indigenous studies, deep ecology, and cosmology. Her dissertation research seeks to examine how a sonically engaged way of being in the world—through an engagement with and a prioritization of sound as a thick, meaningful happening in time—can not only allow for more just ways of relating to and understanding the ecological relationships underpinning our world, but also acts as an opening for an anti-colonial mode of resistance in a dominantly visuocentric hegemonic culture. 

In 2022, Darcy joined the PhD program in composition at Harvard University, studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku. She holds a master of music in composition from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and a bachelor of music in composition from Columbia College Chicago. She is currently the director of the Harvard Group for New Music (HGNM).

She enjoys sci-fi, Japanese literature, green, the first snow of the year, and baking.