In a visually dominated world, sound as an immersive, experiential medium offers a means of cultivating connection, place, and presence.
photo by Maria Nikolic, 2023
Darcy Copeland is an American experimental composer based in Boston. She writes music as a means of personal ethnography and to explore what it is to think, move, feel, and be in a world being ravaged. Working with acoustic instruments, electronics, and visuals, her work interrogates themes of vulnerability, materiality, and affect.
She is also an artist-scholar, conducting research within the fields of sound studies, musicology, affect theory, philosophy, new materialism, Indigenous studies, and deep ecology. 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 allow for more alternative ways of relating to and understanding the ecological relationships underpinning our world in an anti-colonial, de-hegemonized modality.
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. Since April 2024 she has been the director of the Harvard Group for New Music (HGNM).