At the invitation of WCU’s head of Jazz Studies, Jonathan Ragonese, I performed with the Criterions Jazz Ensemble at their 2023 spring concert, “The Rebirth of Wonder.”
Check out the video below! I am featured on “On Green Dolphin Street” Arr. Les Hopper (29:15), and “23N 82 W” by Will Russo (59:08).
As a new faculty member at WCU, I was honored to be invited to perform at the 33rd Annual WCU Jazz Festival with the WCU Faculty Jazz Ensemble. At the Madeleine Wing Adler Theatre, we performed standards and original compositions, including my composition “There and Back” and my arrangement of Jobim’s “O Grande Amor.”
The WCU Faculty Jazz Ensemble:
Jonathan Ragonese, Director & Saxophone
John Swana, Trumpet
Dan Cherry, Trombone
Jeremy Jordan, Piano & Keyboard
Devin Arne, Electric Guitar
David Cullen, Acoustic Guitar
Peter Paulsen, Double Bass
Marc Jacoby, Percussion, Vibraphone
Christopher Hanning, Drum Set
New commercial! I composed this funky, soulful, and brass-heavy track for the latest commercial for Febreeze with duotone. Nate Sanders is featured on the trumpet, with yours truly on guitar, bass, keys, and production.
I am thrilled to announce that my music has been featured in the first season of Mind Your Matters on Netflix. My track “Prime Time,” published by Lift Music, can be heard in the Episode Elevate My Life.
As described in the Netflix Blog, Tudum, “Sara Jane Ho aims to help her clients create positive change in their lives. In Season 1 of Mind Your Manners, the etiquette expert works with six people from different backgrounds to develop their social skills, build confidence and improve their professional and personal relationships. Drawing on Chinese and Western perspectives, Ho offers a distinctive approach to navigating various social situations and cultivating good habits at home that serves as a foundation for personal growth.”
Thanks to many herculean efforts made by my colleagues over the last several years, I am thrilled to share that The Wells School of Music at West Chester University now offers a Bachelor of Music in Studio Composition.
I am honored to be a part of this unique, one-of-a-kind program at WCU. This is high-quality music education at an affordable price and in an ideal location, given West Chester’s proximity to Philadelphia, New York, and Washington D.C. The Bachelor of Music in Studio Composition is perfect for students who want to combine music production, entrepreneurship, and technology alongside composition and performance. At West Chester University, students have access to incredible faculty and facilities, including our Center for Music Technology as well as the opportunity to collaborate with a large and growing student body of musicians.
Check out the feature on the WCU News Page here
I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Studio Composition at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. This brand new role will serve the recently created Bachelor’s Degree program where students will study music production, film and media scoring, songwriting, and music entrepreneurship. To say I am ecstatic is an understatement. I look forward to this wonderful new chapter filled with music, artistry, mentorship, community, and life in the greater Philadelphia area.
My sound installation Unheard Voices: The Embodied and Networked Intelligence of Plants was recently featured in The State Press, the ASU Student Newspaper.
“Pinecones rattling: Sound installation brings attention to environment” by Anna Campbell with photos by Alex Gould.
More information about Unheard Voices, including project description, video, and audio can be found here.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear is an exploration of timbre and gesture. I began my composition of the piece by performing and recording the same note (E5) on various guitars, using different articulations, bowed, picked, and fingers. Using GRM tools, iZotope RX, and Logic, the sounds were processed and reimagined. Some remained close to their original form, others transformed to the point of being barely recognizable as a guitar but retaining aspects of the original musical gesture.
Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World inspired the piece’s title. In his book, Morton uses the phrase which is printed on the rear-view mirror of every car sold in North America as a metaphor for the closeness of hyperobjects such as climate change, and nuclear waste, in the age of the Anthropocene. There is no longer an “over there” or an “away.” We find ourselves close, at times uncomfortably so, with the surrounding world.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear premiered at the ASU Composition Studio Recital on November 15, 2020.
As part of my research for my dissertation, I have been doing a series of field recordings focusing on the Acoustic Ecology of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My approach in these recordings is to capture a moment of time in the unique habitats of the Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens eco-region, including marshes, pine/oak woodlands, and beaches. Rather than focus on a single sound source, my intention with the recordings capturing the sound of the environment as a whole: birds, insects, plants wind, and water.
I will be adding new recordings weekly on my Sound Cloud to create an online archive of the sounds of Summer and Fall in Cape Cod.
In Place is an exploration of the sounds of home and the mental states that arise from being sheltered in place. The source material for the piece is recordings of pots, glasses, running water, and a dog barking at a broom. These familiar sounds are then altered in both size and texture. A major theme explored is the transformation of states of matter: solids become liquid, and liquids become frozen and crystalline. Through the (d)evolution of sounds, In Place explores the constant flux of perception of the external world and the internal worlds of thought, memory, and daydreams.
I recorded all sounds using a stereo pair of Røde M5 microphones. I used GRM Tools plugins, Spear, and RX to edit and process the sound creating a folder of sonic assets that I used to construct the piece. The piece was arranged and mixed using Reaper, IEM Ambisonic plugins. In Place follows a palindromic form based around material: ceramic, glass, water, straw/animal, water, glass, ceramic.
