The Corwin Concert Series presents the Graduate Composers Concert. Join us for a night of electroacoustic music featuring the works of graduate student composers Radna, James, Flieder, Derakhshani, and Yuan. 

Raphael Radna holds a BA in Music from Vassar College, an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, and an MS in Media Arts and Technology from UC Santa Barbara, where he is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition.

Alysia Michelle James is an interdisciplinary composer and aerialist who often performs aerial acrobatics to her original work. Her interests lie in the space between related art forms. She completed a BA in Music Composition at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies, a Master’s of Music Composition at CSULB and is currently working on a PhD in Music Composition at UCSB. 

Drew Flieder (b. 1995) is a composer of instrumental and electronic music. Inspired by the rigorous methods and iconoclasm of Xenakis, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Cage, he set out to create a universal theoretical basis from which new works could be generated. This project, called Tools for Worldmaking, was completed in 2022, drawing on the works of Mazzola, Carnap, and Aristotle, among others. Beyond formal experimentation, Flieder’s work is motivated by a spiritual vision. He conceives of music not as the expression of emotion, but as the structuring of the mental conditions that generate emotion, “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”

Dariush Derakhshani, an experimental electroacoustic composer and audio programmer based in Santa Barbara, has devoted his research to the study of "ecopoietic synthesis," a sound creation method involving the modeling of at least one element of digital sound waves after natural phenomena. This unique approach to synthesis allows for the creation of sounds that cannot be replicated in the natural world and has inspired Derakhshani's latest acousmatic work, Sonar Eclipse. By utilizing stochastic methods to explore just a fraction of the infinite possibilities offered by ecopoietic synthesis, Derakhshani invites listeners to enter a peculiar corner of the sound universe where the local sound objects behave and feel familiar, yet not impeccably. The exploration of this vast sound universe through ecopoietic synthesis has been a driving force behind Derakhshani's latest works, which began as a case study for this innovative method of sound creation.

Yifeng Yvonne Yuan converts the frequency of herself losing socks into the frequency of the pitches; she weighs raindrops to decide the weight of her note heads. She is a composer, performer, and media artist, born and raised in Taiyuan, China, and currently lives between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Currently, Yvonne is a Ph.D. student in music composition and a master’s student in media art & technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Yvonne studies at UCSB with JoAnn Kuchera-Morin. She has studied with Richard Danielpour, Kay Rhie, Ian Krouse and David Lefkowitz at UCLA. Yvonne draws inspiration from the sound of nature and the ritualistic practice of humans before language was invented. She constantly takes inspiration from non-musical sounds, including the sound of rustling leaves, the beeping of Morse code, and the beating of the heart. She composes for orchestra, chamber ensembles and solo instrument. She is also an avid electronic/computer music enthusiast. Yvonne’s music has been featured at Time of Music, Viitasaari in Finland, HighScore Festival in Italy, Oregon Bach Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, EAMA Institute, and many more.