Investigating the Inner Lives of Sounds with Hannah Selin

Author

Tyler Kline
October 05, 2024

On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by Hannah Selin.

Photo credit: Nicki Adams.

Composer, violist and vocalist Hannah Selin works with acoustic instruments, voices, electronics and field recordings to create striking and vibrant sound-worlds. She grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania helping her parents caretake a cemetery and listening to her mother write songs on scordatura guitar. Her music carries from this a sense of the supernatural, a closeness with the earth, and a love all things resonant. Hannah is co-founder and lead singer with the band GADADU, and violist and founding member of Xanthoria Quartet and Violalia Duo. As a violist, Hannah performs with chamber groups and orchestras throughout the New York metropolitan area.

Hannah’s music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles and soloists including Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra, Voices of Ascension, Ave Sol Chamber Choir, Chromic Duo, S.E.M. Ensemble, Argus Quartet, Network for New Music, and vocalist Stephanie Lamprea. Her choral work “Winter” from Four Mountain Songs won second prize in the 2021 Balsys International Composition Competition, as well as the 2022 Red Jasper Award. Dream Journal and the Apocalypse, her debut album as a composer, was released in April 2024 on Gold Bolus Recordings. In the 2024/25 season, Hannah is working on new commissions for CreArtBox, Kamratōn, SPLICE, and pianist Kathleen Supové with support from the Puffin Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts. Hannah holds a PhD in composition from Temple University and currently teaches at Rowan University.

In this conversation, Hannah discusses how her entry point into music composition was quite a bit different than maybe most people's and how she works with manipulating sound to discover interesting musical material. Nature is also a significant part of Hannah’s creative process, and she and Tyler get into the weeds about that… and bond over their mutual love of Italo Calvino.

Hannah is online at https://hannahselin.com/.

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