Elizabeth Adams writes music for small groups of people. Her work often critiques or models social dynamics, varieties of agency, or exchanges of power. She looks at every neighbor as a potential critic, composer, and performer of our musical and social environments. In New York City, she and the Orfeo Duo co-founded the The Garden Performance Project, a community-garden-based workshop of recycling, instrument-building, composition and performance; New Music Workshops for Amateurs; and Songlines, a collaborative mapping of neighborhoods in song.
She holds degrees in Music, English, Composition, and Experimental Musictheater from Barnard, Stonybrook, and the Hochschule der Künste, Bern. Her work has been performed throughout Europe, but she is currently focussing on community venues in the five boroughs. As a doctoral composer at the CUNY Grad Center, she has taught music history and electronic music at Baruch College. She teaches composition for activists at the School For Designing A Society and composition for microtonalists at Xenharmonic Praxis Summer Camp. The teachers who have most influenced her current thinking are Joe Dubiel, Georges Aperghis, Mark Enslin, Susan Parenti, and Elizabeth Hoffman. In 2011 she co-founded an experimental chamber ensemble called Praxis.
www.designingasociety.org
www.oddmusicuc.wordpress.com/programs/xenharmonic-praxis-summer-camp/
She wrote In The Same Foam for the Hammerklavier project (2013).
