Discipline: Music Composition

Anne LeBaron

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Valencia, CA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1979, 1980, 1982, 1985, 1989, 1990, 1992, 2021

Anne LeBaron’s compositions have been performed worldwide. Her seven operas celebrate legendary female figures, including the renowned voudon queen, Marie Laveau, in Crescent City. Her most recent opera, LSD: Huxley’s Last Trip, includes microtonal instruments built by Harry Partch. During her latest MacDowell residency, she composed music for This Lingering Life, a chamber opera based on playwright Chiori Miyagawa’s audacious and radical retelling of five classic Noh plays. The libretto, by Mark Campbell and Miyagawa, leaps deftly across cultures, geography, and time to connect disparate people looking for meaning in their lives: a woman with tragic hair wanders through time to understand the reasons for her fate; a young warrior dies and dies again; an unhinged woman searches for her lost son; two lovers reconnect across the Milky Way; and an old gardener foolishly falls in love with a princess. The lines between life, death, and afterlife blur, and we learn that the actions and thoughts in this world continue with rewards and consequences thereafter. Two scenes from the opera were performed live by West Edge Opera in May, 2021. LeBaron teaches in the Composition and Experimental Sound Practices Program at CalArts.

Studios

Phi Beta

Anne LeBaron worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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