2019-20 Composer-in-Residence

In partnership with the Center for New Music, ACF is thrilled to announce that Oakland-based artist Julie Herndon is the recipient of ACF’s first Bay Area Composer Residency award, a $10,000 grant for a local, composer-led community collaboration project. Julie will organize and lead Soundvoice 2020 with the Center for New Music and Code Tenderloin. Continuing the legacy of two previous Soundvoice projects, she will engage members of the homeless community in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood to workshop and create a multi-media concert featuring their stories and creativity. Read the full Soundvoice story.

Each class will feature a different guest artist presenting compositional tools that participants can use to build audio-editing abilities, develop computer skills, and facilitate self-expression. Since its debut as a San Francisco Contemporary Music Players program in 2015, Soundvoice workshops have a history of success in building a lasting relationship between the arts community and residents. What makes Soundvoice unique in 2020 is its experience-centered curriculum, the diversity of instructor expertise, and a partnership with Code Tenderloin, a workforce development nonprofit. They will locate and reach out to the target audience for this project—people experiencing homelessness around the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.

Herndon shares, “I’m so grateful to ACF for the opportunity to grow my community with sound!” The workshops will be led by Herndon, along with John Ivers, Barbara Nerness, Matt Robidoux, and Julie Zhu: artists and composers based in Stanford, San Francisco, and the East Bay who are committed to sharing their practice in order to build community and create a shared space. Classes will take place at the Center for New Music, which is located in the heart of the Tenderloin neighborhood. The culmination of this program will be a collaborative multimedia concert, free to the public, featuring the work of the participants supported by the workshop faculty. The Code Tenderloin team says, “We are excited to have Soundvoice join the Tenderloin community in empowering our homeless population. We look forward to being part of the impact this program will make in our community and seeing the lives that will be touched through their programs!”

About Julie Herndon

Julie Herndon is an Oakland-based composer and performer working with internal/external space through improvisation, text, graphics, and electronics. Her work explores the body’s relationship to the self, to performance, and to tools like musical instruments and personal technology. Recent electroacoustic work has been described as “blended to inhabit a surprisingly expressive space” (San Francisco Classical Voice). Her compositions have been performed by ensembles including JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Proton Bern, Line Upon Line Percussion, TAK Ensemble, Retro Disco, and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Performances of her work include MATA Festival and MIS-EN_PLACE Bushwick in New York, Artistry Space in Singapore, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, and Hot Air Festival in San Francisco.

An active educator, Herndon has led classes at Mills College and assisted courses in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Stanford, in subjects ranging from anime to transidiomatic art-making. As a collaborator, Herndon is co-founder of hi, a duo featuring harmonium, clarinet, and electronics, and fff, an interdisciplinary artist collective. She holds a B.A. in Music from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and an M.A. in Music Composition from Mills College, and is currently a Hume Fellow pursuing a doctorate at Stanford University.

Photo by John Ivers.

Read and download the full press release