Brittany J. Green

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Composer Brittany J. Green is already making waves in the world of new classical music. However, given the variety of inspirations that pervades her work — from computer-coding languages to Black feminist theory — and her growing passion for electronica and for DJing her own sets, she is very much beating an artistic path that disregards the boundaries of genre.

Her work has been performed at concerts and festivals throughout the United States, including the Boulanger Initiative’s WoCo Fest and New York City Electronic Music Festival, and last year she recorded a new piece with the Atlanta Symphony that was released online in January 2022 as part of the Symphony’s “Concerts for Young People” series.

A recent recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Scholarship and the ASCAP Foundation’s Morton Gould Award, Brittany is currently in residence at Duke University in Durham, NC, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition as a Deans Graduate Fellow. 

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Brittany discusses the two qualities that guide the evolution of her compositional practice: her ability to learn through deep listening and her commitment to cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• I imagine that getting a doctorate is partly about committing to your teaching career, but I’m curious about how getting a doctorate is expanding your artistic practice?
• So that we could better understand your work and talk about the way you incorporate so many different strands, can you describe a recent piece of yours and how you went about creating it? 
• How comfortable are you with the label of classical composer? Is that at all useful to you?
• You mentioned that one of the things you love to do that being in graduate school has afforded you is the opportunity to collaborate with a host of different artists. Can you talk about some of those collaborations?
• Did you have to teach yourself to be this collaborative, or did it come naturally?
• You mentioned new music. How does the field of classical music define new music and what enters the canon? Who decides it’s new music?
• Is it tricky for you to decide where your work fits in? Is that at all useful or is that important for forming a career?
• When you first committed to becoming a composer, did you have an expectation of what your career might look like, and how has that expectation changed since?
• I’m wondering how the pandemic affected your work. All the collaborations you were doing probably could not proceed. How did you work through that?
• You teach, of course, at Duke. What insight or skill do you think it’s most important to share with those students of yours who might wish to pursue a career in music?
• If you could snap your fingers and reinvent a system that is no longer working in your field, what could be fixed to make your work and the work of other up-and-coming composers like you easier?

Pier Carlo: I imagine that getting a doctorate is partly about committing to your teaching career, but I’m curious about how getting a doctorate is expanding your artistic practice?

Brittany: One of the wonderful things about Duke University, where I’m at for my doctorate, is that there’s so much cross-disciplinary activity on campus. Being able to connect with folks who are videographers, dancers, poets has greatly expanded my compositional practice, expanded the way I think about music, the way I think about music in relation to other artforms and obviously has opened the door for some wonderful collaborations and conversations around creating projects that are interdisciplinary projects.

On top of that, just learning about things from a variety of disciplines — even outside of artistic disciplines, taking classes that explore feminism or that explore other things — and finding ways to connect that back to the music has been really exciting. That’s something I don’t know that I would have had the opportunity to do if I wasn’t getting my doctorate and wasn’t deeply entrenched in both this rigorous academic work and this artistic work at the same time, while also being able to connect with other people who are in the same position but maybe from a different artform.

Pier Carlo: So that we could better understand your work and talk about the way you incorporate so many different strands — you mentioned feminist theory, and I know you’ve included programming languages into your music — can you describe a recent piece of yours and how you went about creating it? 

Brittany: Sure. One of my recent pieces, “r_upTure,” deals with both of those things. Right before I began writing that piece, I was in the process of learning Python. I was at a point where I felt like —

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] Now, were you just learning it for the hell of it? 

Brittany: [She laughs.] So at Duke, we have to know a foreign language. We have a foreign-language exam, and for composition, we are allowed to use a computer-programming language for that foreign-language exam. Before that, I’d used some programming in pieces, mainly through Max/MSP [a visual programming language for music and multimedia]. It made sense for me to pursue a computer-programming language to meet that requirement and also open up a door for including that in my compositional practice, if it ever came to a point where I needed it. So that’s why I was learning Python.

... the fun thing about doing a project is it unearths all these questions that you wouldn’t have thought of before because you weren’t particularly trying to do anything.

I was at a point where I felt like, “OK, I understand the basics, but I feel like I really just need to jump into a project and see what happens.” Because the fun thing about doing a project is it unearths all these questions that you wouldn’t have thought of before because you weren’t particularly trying to do anything.

I was also interested at the same time in finding ways for my interest in Black feminist theory to connect with my music. I had this idea of, “Well, why don’t I build a Python program that’s kind of inspired by some of the things I’ve been reading, particularly centering around what it means to rupture or break or disrupt a system?” So building a program that builds a system and then disrupts it, either in a methodological way or in an unexpected way, or maybe a combination of both of those things.

I built a program that would take a chord progression and filter out pitches in the chord progression. The way that it works is you feed it a chord progression, it plays through the chord progression normally one time through, and then the second time, once it loops and starts to go through the progression again, it only plays pitches that are in the previous chord that are common between the current chord and the previous chord. So let’s say you’re going from a G7 to a C chord, you would only maintain the G, for example. 

And then I expanded that to allow it to include extended harmonies that are found with particular chords, and I got this interesting groove figure. Then what I had the program do after that is after a certain amount of time — because after a while it sort of starts to repeat the same three or four pitches — pitches that were filtered out sort of reintroduce themselves. Not only do they reappear, they also disrupt the rhythm of the gesture that comes out of the program. So as the chords are being filtered, it’s pretty much playing steady eighth notes, and then the rhythm gets a little bit more complex. Either notes get longer, or they get shorter. They get weird in terms of rhythm.

Pier Carlo: So each performance of it, I’m guessing, is completely different, because you’re feeding in different chords to start?

Brittany: Yes. Each iteration is different, even if you feed it the same chord, because the way that the filtered-out pitches are reintroduced appears random. It’s not technically random, but it does kind of have a randomness to it. So when pitches are reintroduced, they’re not reintroduced the same way. 

I ran it several times and got these wide-ranging iterations. I was listening back to them, and I was like, “This sounds like it would be really good source of material for a piece.” So I decided to write a piece. And that was not the original plan, but I ended up writing a piece based off of that material and orchestrating it out for an ensemble. And then taking that same kind of formal concept of a system being built and then disrupted and expanding that across the course of the piece.

Pier Carlo: How does the piece address the Black feminism angle?

Brittany: Essentially the piece is looking at what it means for bodies inside of a system to break a system down from the inside-out. In this case, the bodies would be pitches that are being filtered out, that process of breaking through the musical structure that’s established at the beginning of the piece and then completely disrupting it and breaking it down to nothing. The piece ends on a single pitch, a repeated single pitch. 

I was particularly interested in the work of bell hooks and looking at the ways she spoke about reading oneself in a system in which you weren’t supposed to be and how you can read against the grain, see yourself against that system, disrupt, dismantle, reimagine that system. So that’s really what I was interested in exploring in that piece.

Pier Carlo: How comfortable are you with the label of classical composer? Is that at all useful to you?

Brittany: It’s interesting. People ask me that question fairly often. I feel comfortable with that label, but I do feel like it doesn’t completely capture everything that I do and that I’m interested in. I do obviously write classical music, very typical new music, if you will, but I also do a lot of other things. I love working with electronics. 

Pier Carlo: I know; there’s a picture on your website of you DJing!  

Brittany: Yeah. Something that I’m also interested in is performing primarily with live electronics, doing improvisation with live electronics, also working with multimedia, doing music for film and things like that. There’s a lot of different things that I’m interested in. I feel like classical composition is only a piece of that pie.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned that one of the things you love to do that being in graduate school has afforded you is the opportunity to collaborate with a host of different artists. Can you talk about some of those collaborations?

Brittany: Yes. I actually just finished two projects that were collaborations with poets, the first of which was a collaboration with poet Marlanda Dekine, who’s from South Carolina. Marlanda and I and a videographer also from South Carolina, Mahkia Greene, just finished a project called “Thresh & Hold.” This project is a multimedia project that is a sister project to a book of poetry also called “Thresh & Hold” by Marlanda.

For that project, we worked together to create a film with sound to go along with the poetry. In that project, you hear readings of poems from the book which deal with ancestry and land, particularly this piece of land that Marlanda’s family owns in South Carolina. Then in the sound, you hear field recordings from that land that she recorded on that land, and those are mixed in with electronic tracks. It draws influence from everything from classical music to EDM. You hear these combinations of field recordings, and then they start to move into these electronic dance moments. That was a fun project. 

Then another project that I just did was a grief choreo-poem project with a poet here at Duke University, Amanda Bennett, and Embodiment Contemporary Dance here at Duke. We actually last Friday just premiered that work in the Duke Gardens. That consisted of a live reading of poetry. The dancers danced to the poetry, and then I composed music to go along with the reading and the dancing. So that’s one aspect of collaboration I’ve been doing. 

I’ve also been working with a videographer from Duke University who is a Ph.D. student in the computational media arts and cultures department. We’re working on an installation called “Black Echoes” which deals with this bamboo-forest area in the West End neighborhood of Durham and looks at the history of that land and where that land is today in imagined futures. That project involves a lot of video and sound, and as participants move through the installation, the sound that they make as they move through impacts what they see and what they hear. There’ll be some amplitude-tracking that is using that data to then show and play imagined futures and look at the past of that land.

Pier Carlo: I have this probably completely wrong view of composers as being very solitary until they actually have to work with musicians. Did you have to teach yourself to be this collaborative, or did it come naturally? 

Brittany: Yeah, I think I did. I feel like the way that we have structured the collaborative process between performers and composers in a classical-music sense — so let’s say I’m just writing a woodwind quintet and I want a woodwind quintet to play that piece — that collaborative structure is much like you’ve described. I’m sitting alone in a room; I compose this piece; and then maybe my school is bringing in a woodwind quintet, or maybe I’m in a theory class with a woodwind quintet and I ask them, “Will you play this piece?” And they practice the piece. Maybe I come to a rehearsal and give some feedback, and then they perform the piece. 

So rhythm to me and what I want to communicate when I talk about rhythm is different than it might be for a dancer or for a videographer, and so part of the fun in collaborating across disciplines is kind of learning the language and learning, “Well, what’s similar? What’s different? How do I communicate this? How do I communicate that?”

But that is a very different kind of collaborative setup than what you have to do if you want to work with people in other artforms. For one, you don’t communicate the same way. So rhythm to me and what I want to communicate when I talk about rhythm is different than it might be for a dancer or for a videographer, and so part of the fun in collaborating across disciplines is kind of learning the language and learning, “Well, what’s similar? What’s different? How do I communicate this? How do I communicate that?”

Then also you have to do the work of reaching out and finding folks and connecting with people in a way that is different than when you’re just working with musicians. But the wonderful thing about that is I’ve found that it also has helped me redefine the way I approach collaboration with musicians. I think a lot of times it’s easy for composers to not view that relationship as a collaborative one. It’s kind of a one-directional exchange of information: “I wrote the score. I hand you the score. You interpret the score.” 

But there’s so much room for more back-and-forth collaboration with the musicians. You can ask them, “I’m going for this here. What I have written, is that clear to you that that’s what I’m going for, or are there ways that I can achieve that more?” Because instrumentalists — unless you, the composer, play that instrument — understand the instrument in a more intimate way than we do as composers. It’s always nice to be able to establish that kind of feedback and looped collaboration. 

You have to have that when you’re collaborating with people who aren’t musicians because there’s just no way that you’d be able to get things done or get on the same page. It forces you to relook at that, and then you can apply that same kind of approach to collaboration when you’re working with musicians. I’ve found that’s been really helpful for me.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned new music. How does the field of classical music define new music and what enters the canon? Who decides it’s new music? It’s a little hazy to me.

Brittany: It’s hazy to all of us. [She laughs.] I find if you ask 10 musicians what new music is, you get 10 different answers. It’s one of those things that’s hard to pin down because for one, sometimes it’s used as a genre type — so to speak to specific types of musical attributes in a given piece — and then sometimes it’s used more as like a marker of time — so just music that was composed in the last X number of years. And people, I’ve noticed, use it interchangeably. 

Then even when people are using it as a kind of descriptor, the qualities that they attribute to that descriptor are different from person to person. So that’s something that is really difficult to pin down. I know some people prefer “contemporary music;” some people prefer “art music;” some people prefer “Western art music.” And there’s just a lot to unpack there, especially when you start using terms like art music, which implies that this music is high art, which then makes you ask, “OK, well, what is other music? Does that make it low art? What does that mean? How are we thinking about the way we’re classifying things as high and low?” It gets quite tricky. 

Pier Carlo: Is it tricky for you to decide where your work fits in? Is that at all useful or is that important for forming a career?

Brittany: I think it is difficult for me as a composer to figure out where my work fits in within that, particularly because my work is quite varied. I have a lot of pieces that are just completely different from one another in approach, in sound, and so it’s kind of difficult when you’re thinking about, “How would I classify myself as a musician, as a composer?” Thinking of the totality of my catalog, it gets a little difficult for me. 

I think that there’s something interesting that we could gain from trying to move away from this desire or need to label everything and to have a nice, pretty box for it to fit in.

I think something that is interesting is our desire to classify. I wonder, “Well, what does it mean if we can’t classify it? And is that OK?” I mean, I think it’s OK. [She laughs.] I think that there’s something interesting that we could gain from trying to move away from this desire or need to label everything and to have a nice, pretty box for it to fit in.

I think part of that desire is in the way that we look at the past. When you study music, you study everything in labels. “Well, this was serialism. This was minimalism. This was classical music. This was romantic music.” [Laughing] I imagine that the past was not that clear-cut. Part of that is just as a teacher, if I’m trying to teach my students, for example, what a sonata form is, the best way to do that is to find the best clear-cut example of that just so that they have a clear understanding of what that is. But that’s not always necessarily reflective of reality. Most things don’t fit into a genre or a form type that clearly. 

It’s interesting how we are trying to recreate that in the present moment, and I think part of that stems from the way that we engage with the past.

Pier Carlo: When you first committed to becoming a composer, did you have an expectation of what your career might look like, and how has that expectation changed since?

Brittany: I don’t think I had an expectation. I certainly had things I hoped to do. 

For one, when I decided to really start pursuing composition full-time, up to that point I was composing on the side, but my focus in training was primarily in music education. I had great, clear examples of what a music educator was; not so great, clear examples of what a living composer is and does, mostly because we traffic a lot in music by people who are no longer living. Or in the band world — because I was a band educator — composers are living, but they’re far removed, this kind of pie-in-the-sky figure. 

At the time when I decided to focus on composition, I really wanted to do band composition because that was primarily what I had been working on. 

Pier Carlo: I want to make sure I understand what you mean by band composition.

Brittany: Composing for concert bands, wind ensembles, symphonic bands. I was looking at composers like Frank Ticheli, for example, building a career like that. 

When I went to get my master’s, I started listening to a lot of different music, analyzing and studying a lot of different music, and really got interested in chamber music and electronic and electroacoustic music. So those things shifted a bit, and the things I wrote started changing. And then at that point, because I was deeply wrapped up in the composition world, I started having different ideas about what it would mean to build a career as a composer and seeing different examples of that. Those ideas sort of shifted a little bit. 

I think I’m at the point where I realize that you can have plans or goals or an ideal kind of image of what you want that career to look like but some of the most fascinating aspects of building a career as a composer are the unexpected things that happen and the unexpected things that shift your career in different ways.

It’s this interesting dance between having a plan and working towards that plan but also leaving space in that plan for the unexpected and leaving yourself room to allow it to take you where it takes you.

Even looking at the type of music I want to write, the type of music I wanted to write five years ago is different than the music I’m writing today. Even the type of music I thought I’d be writing two years ago is quite different. And so just kind of going along with the ride to a certain extent and seeing what happens. It’s this interesting dance between having a plan and working towards that plan but also leaving space in that plan for the unexpected and leaving yourself room to allow it to take you where it takes you.

Pier Carlo: Well, speaking of unexpected, I’m wondering how the pandemic affected your work. All the collaborations you were doing probably could not proceed. How did you work through that?

Brittany: My experience of the pandemic is interesting because I feel like it deeply shaped my compositional practice today in a way that I’m 90% certain the way I’m writing today would not be the same if the pandemic didn’t happen. Because everything was shut down and live performances were suspended indefinitely, it kind of makes it difficult to feel motivated to write acoustic music. 

I had already been writing electroacoustic music, and I had done a couple of electronic pieces, but I really, really started delving into that during the pandemic. And then also that’s when I started working on performing with live electronics. I started improvising a lot with live electronics. I primarily use [music production and performance software] Ableton Live. I started really digging into Ableton and studying it and figuring out different ways to do things, figuring out how to make it a part of my artistic practice. That deeply shaped my work in terms of, one, just becoming a performer again and performing with electronics, and two, also my approach to composition and really implementing a place for improvisation in that approach, both in terms of creating more music that leaves space for performers to improvise and then also using improvisation as a compositional tool as a composer.

So sometimes I’ll have an idea and I’ll improvise. I’ll do maybe 15 different improvisations with that idea and then go back and listen to those improvisations and sift out material to build a piece around. Also, I incorporate electronics into my compositional process even for pieces that are acoustic pieces. I’m looking at using programming more, using Ableton as a tool for generating material that I can then pick and pull from to create a piece.

All of those things, I think, would not have happened if it wasn’t for the pandemic and just having that space and time to delve into those things. And then also that desire to create music in a way that felt immediate in a way where I could listen to what I was creating instead of writing something for a string quartet and then not knowing when I would hear it. So yeah, for me, it really happened.

Pier Carlo: When you say you were performing, what did that look like during the pandemic? Were you videotaping yourself?

Brittany: Yeah, I would do videotaped improvisations. I did one for Experimental Sound Studio. I did a collaboration with International Contemporary Ensemble where we performed a piece I wrote in 2017 that was a kind of a guided-improvisation open-score piece. I worked with a flutist, a harpist, and then I improvised on live electronics. We collaborated virtually to put those improvisations together. One person would improvise and then send their recording to the next person. And they would improvise while listening to that and then send it to the last person. And the last person improvised while listening to the other two performances.

Then once things started opening up, I started doing those things but just live. I performed at the Boulanger Initiative’s WoCo Fest in DC last year as well as at Duke Coffeehouse. Things like that. That whole kind of performance aspect was not even on my radar until COVID. [She laughs.] Then some of the ways in which I was creating sound in those improvisations made its way into the fixed-media electronic tracks that I have been composing since then.

Pier Carlo: You teach, of course, at Duke. What insight or skill do you think it’s most important to share with those students of yours who might wish to pursue a career in music?

I think for me a career in music requires two very simple things. The first one is being a good listener, and the second one is knowing how to be in community with people.

Brittany: I think for me a career in music requires two very simple things. The first one is being a good listener, and the second one is knowing how to be in community with people. I know a lot of times when people talk about building careers in music, they’re talking about the larger-scale things of, “Oh, if you’re a performer, have your excerpts ready for auditions,” or, “If you’re a composer, make sure you’re writing for this ensemble and this ensemble. You need to go to this festival and do these things.” But I think everything boils down to those two things: being a good listener and being in community. 

To me, a great musician is a great listener, which means being able to listen to a lot of different things, understand what’s going on and remember that and pull from that in your own practice. The more you listen, the more tools you have in the toolshed that you can draw from and use when you sit down to write, either recreating things, creating things that are the antithesis of things that you’ve heard, creating things that are complementary to what you’ve heard and using those things as tools in your own music.

Then I think being in community is the other piece, being able to build collaborative relationships with performers or with other artists, being able to champion not only your work but the work of others, being someone who can help contribute to the field. I always feel like you should give as much as you ask for. I think those two things, if you can do those two things, you can do all of the higher-level things that are required, and it’ll help you shape not only a good career but a good career that you want.

I think if I were to add a third thing, it would be being open and not letting a particular view of what a career should be pin you down and make you think that you need to do certain things or write certain things, if that is not what feels true to you as an artist. I feel like being in community with people allows you not only to build a career but to build a career that feels good for you because you find your tribe. You find people who are doing things that speak to you, people who want to champion what you’re doing because your work speaks to them. I think that’s really important, unless you want to burn yourself out doing something that you don’t enjoy.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned when you were describing your piece “r_upTure” that you were using the coding language as a disruptive system. One of the things I love to talk to artists about here is about disrupting macro systems in order to allow artists to do their work more freely. 

If you could snap your fingers and reinvent a system that is no longer working in your field, what could be fixed to make your work and the work of other up-and-coming composers like you easier?

Brittany: I would say one of the big things would be issues around funding. If I could have my ideal world, when people get funding to make projects, that would also include other things that people need to survive and then in turn create good art, which would be, for example, health insurance. That’s like a big thing that I’ve been talking with a lot of people about recently, the precarity of that.

I think that it is much easier to make great, thoughtful music when all of your basic needs are being met, when you’re not worrying about paying rent or, “What am I going to eat next week? I’m sick, and I don’t have health insurance, so I can’t go to the doctor.” When all of those needs are being met, it’s easier for you to then sit and focus and think about the material and create things that are really interesting and thought-provoking.

Pier Carlo: So right now funders fund a commission, I imagine, for just a piece. But you are thinking they should fund a more holistic way to commit to a composer, for instance, for a year or two and allow them to live.

Brittany: Yeah, exactly. There are some organizations that do residencies, for example, but a lot of times they don’t include other things like health insurance. 

I think the next thing would be to fund composers to create what they want to create. A lot of times, funding opportunities come with some sort of artistic stipulation. “We want to give you $10,000 to create a piece for this ensemble that has this theme.” The instrumentation piece to me is not a problem. Obviously, you want to fund people to create something for the group that will then play it. But just giving composers more freedom in terms of the conceptual ideas or the themes of the piece would be nice.

Pier Carlo: Oh, so sometimes commissions come with that strict a stipulation, even thematically?

Brittany: Yeah.

Pier Carlo: I see. I didn’t know that.

Brittany: Yeah. I always wonder what composers would create if they could create anything. You kind of run into a situation where if people are relying on commissions for their livelihood, well their artistic output is then tied to whatever they get paid to make. So I always wonder like, “Man, there could be people who have amazing ideas that we can’t even comprehend, that we don’t ever get a chance to hear or see because no one has funded them in a way in which they could explore those ideas!”