Interview by Amy Karagiannakis
Your recent work under The Mother’s Teeth is musically and conceptually bold. What drew you to this moniker and what are you currently exploring with it?
As someone who has been very bookish since childhood, I have always been drawn to wordplay, in both its silliest and most semiotically rich forms. The Mother’s Teeth comes from a longstanding, multi-layered inside joke between me and my husband Patrick, who is also a UIUC alumnus (DMA’21 in Choral Conducting). It has two main sources of inspiration:
1) The name itself is a pun on the French title translation of the film Jaws (Les dents de la mer, literally “the teeth of the sea”), which I only encountered because of the mandatory bilingual packaging on everything in Canada (where I had moved with my husband after finishing my degree at UIUC). Jaws itself was the subject of many jokes in our relationship, but all of that would be too long to describe! “La mer” became “la mère” (mother), and I decided I liked the ring of “Les dents de la mère” back in English. So, The Mother’s Teeth is kind of this post-structural translation of Jaws.
2) My graduate work at UIUC got me interested in feminist theory and practices of applied cultural theory (research-creation), so The Mother’s Teeth also encompasses ideas I had been wrestling—both personally and intellectually—with about femininity, female identity, and iconographies of the harp. Since I’ve been preoccupied with monstrosity as this intervention of normative gender expression, the mother’s teeth refer to the oh-so-scary vagina dentata… I wanted to play with the idea of these beautiful, angelic harpists going totally feral, but more “terrifying and weird” and less “sexy girls gone wild.”
How has working with electroacoustic harp transformed your relationship with the instrument?
The process of getting to know the electroacoustic harp has felt very existential, but I think that has something to do with the fact that I started playing the harp when I was four and always studied it quite seriously. It feels like the harp and I grew up together, so in many ways, my whole outlook on life has been shaped by the harp and classical music. I’m also still actively a classical harpist and very much enjoy that work; it’s just that juggling two different musical practices often feels like a philosophical struggle between two sides of myself.
It’s important to explain that electroacoustic harps are really a transitional instrument for classical harpists; they were initially designed to be amplified versions of acoustic harps (e.g., for jazz or rock shows), and only within the past two decades or so have harpists, mostly in experimental genres, started exploring with its expressive potential. I’m experienced that this exploration, however, requires un-learning values drilled deeply by classical training, such as valorizing musical complexity or technical virtuosity over other qualities like temporal affects and sonic color (timbre).
When I sit at the electroacoustic harp now, I do very little playing, maybe 20% of the time is fingers on strings and the other 80% is working on the DAW or just listening over and over again to the same sounds. Sometimes I only use a few strings—which can feel frustrating because I’ll think to myself, “I didn’t practice 6 hours a day for decades to do this!”—but as most artists know, putting restrictions around oneself is often the best way to push the envelope. The tighter the box, the more creative you have to be.
Can you tell me about your recent collaboration with transdisciplinary artist Tra Bouscaren? How did this project come about? The Angel of Death reimagined the harp in the context of crash debris and sculpture. How did this shift your understanding of the harp’s identity—not simply as a refined classical instrument, but as a vehicle for raw, sonic inquiry?
Tra Bouscaren and I had met at Florida State University and became friends because of similar interests as artists working with critical theory. At the time, he had brought up that he was toying with the idea of building a harp out of car doors—his practice involves repurposing trash into these huge fluorescent installations—but then he moved to Phoenix for a new job. However, he kept bringing up this harp idea and would send me these partial prototypes, so when he finally decided to build it for an exhibit at ASU in April 2025, I agreed to perform on it. I really had no idea what the final product was going to look like or what I was going to play.
In February 2025, I flew to Phoenix to test the instrument. Of course, it wasn’t what I expected at all; it looked nothing like a harp and couldn’t be played like one. Honestly, it didn’t sound acoustically great, but it was amplified so that sound didn’t matter too much. Neither he nor his assistant were musicians, so the stringing and the tuning needed to be adjusted. One of the most jarring aspects was the fact that because the instrument was strung randomly (vertically and diagonally) and with a mixed variety of strings, it couldn’t be tuned in any logical way. I could tune a few sections to allow for some harmonic chords, but I really had to lean into the noise potential of Tra’s harp.
You described the sound of this instrument as “industrial” and embraced the challenge as an experimental leap. Could you walk me through your process of adapting your technique to that unconventional sound?
On the pedal harp, I had already played a lot of experimental classical works that involve extended techniques, such as hitting the body of the harp and scraping the strings with all manner of tools. So, I knew I could bring some of those techniques to this instrument, since they are often used by composers to imply metallic and/or “edgy” effects. Because Tra’s harp had a metal body and all wire strings, it was extremely resonant, meaning some of the strings created huge vibrations. String vibration is, to me, one of the most interesting effects to manipulate; it’s possible to create beautiful drones just by carefully vibrating the string off, for example, a rubber stick. Amplified and processed with a multi-effects pedal, those basic sounds can transform into something even more interesting
I improvised most of the final performance, and with an amplified instrument like that, it was easy to lean into a more aggressive style of playing: slapping the strings to create boom-y clusters, being OK letting strings clang in each other (a huge no-no in classical technique), and creating all these eerie microtonal pitch bends (abandoning harmonic language altogether!) because the wire strings could withstand the frequent changes in tension. I did break a few strings, but even that noise became part of the performance.
What does it mean to teach “entrepreneurship” to young musicians? What skills or mindset do you most want to cultivate in your students?
The word “entrepreneurship” can get overused as a buzzword in music academia and has been used to refer to a broad curricular spectrum, ranging from professional development tools to industry survival skills to small business or non-profit incubation. While practical skills, such as creating a press kit or learning how to negotiate contracts, are essential to know and should be taught to young musicians in every post-secondary program, the core of entrepreneurship is something much more conceptual: it’s bringing a new idea to life. It’s a sharp analytical sense of the larger cultural, social, and economic landscapes in which music lives, it’s the creativity that propels innovations on those landscapes, and it’s the drive that turns those innovative concepts into real practices.
However, I am a big believer in translating concepts into actionable steps. So, in my introductory music entrepreneurship class at FSU, we use the Business Model Canvas as a template for realizing ideas from students (real examples: “I’m interested in making opera more accessible to listeners” or “I want to bridge music therapy and mental health services for teen girls”). My students learn basics of product development, brand differentiation, marketing strategies, resource creation, and funding and budgeting. Basically, they learn how to identify, capture, and package something of value, which they can then sell to (or simply share with) others.
In the face of shrinking budgets, I am optimistic that music and musicians offer so much of value to society. That value, though, can be difficult to communicate when we are fixated always on creating music, so teaching entrepreneurship has been a way to encourage students to re-imagine the value of music (and musical life) within larger, ever-evolving human ecosystems.
What changes would you like to see in how music programs in higher education approach interdisciplinary work and performance?
Most post-secondary music programs run into the problem of separating research and applied performance areas—most evident in the siloing of degrees (BA vs. BM, MA vs. MM, PhD vs. DMA). Performance programs are often run like conservatories, which are vocational in nature in that students train to be professional musicians. What’s great about the University of Illinois, and the reason I decided to return for my DMA, is that the School of Music is in a larger college and that college, a research university. The Krannert Center is a particularly amazing place and exposes students to so many creative artistic collaborations such as “The Tao of Bach,” a 2012 collaboration between Ann Yeung (Professor of Harp) and three other performers, tai-chi master Chung-liang Huang, and the eDream Institute.
Even so, engaging in interdisciplinary work in higher education tends to be a personal endeavor rather than something built into the curriculum. Interdisciplinary work also requires developing original research, which really goes against music performance programs’ tendency to overemphasize practicing and rehearsing. One change I would love to see is more collaborative creative labs populated by faculty and students from different disciplines. In a music context, the lab’s goal is to research and produce music-related projects, whether it is a community concert series, a cross-genre recording, or a new opera. These labs would be educational: they would teach students applied research methods; encourage them to develop strong analytical skills; foster creativity through experimental problem-solving; and allow them to practice teamwork in a safe environment. Of course, students would still hone their disciplinary skills, but labs shift the focus from mastering skills to creating novel applications for those skills, which is exactly my approach to entrepreneurship!
Five years from now, what’s a project or direction you’d be thrilled to realize—musically, artistically, or academically?
My husband can attest that I have probably 10 different projects I’ve told him that I want to realize! I’ll offer two of my favorite ones:
- A dream of mine is to do a “little chapel tour” with my electroacoustic harp, which is to play experimental drone sets in small roadside churches in rural parts of the US. These churches are often empty and very small (3-10 occupancy), and they are meant for short prayers or tiny weddings. I love the juxtaposition of a vast, overwhelming prairie—they feel themselves like sacred places—and the tender confinement of a little wooden church; making this kind of endless electronic music in a space like that…I think it would be such a powerful experience.
- I’m currently interested in studying relationships between music-making and alternative economies, inspired by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning’s work on blockchain-based economics and affect theory through the Three Ecologies Institute. Professional musicians have three pathways for generating income: succeeding as a commercial artist (money from record, ticket, and merch sales), a legacy artist (money from grants and foundations), or an employed artist (income from an institutional or corporate job). There are unsustainable financial issues with all three—vulnerability to rapidly changing popular taste, unprofitability of streaming (for independent artists), budget cuts to public grants and high competition for private ones, and diminishing full-time employment opportunities, especially for performers. Are there other ways that our music-making can generate income? That’s what I’m hoping to figure out.
What do you hope your artistic legacy will be?
As a performer and thinker, I hope to be remembered for doing work that was ahead of its time, work that expands the notion of what a musician can be, and work that makes people see and care for the world differently. If my artistic legacy ends up being that I was a harpist who thought very deeply about life, I’m OK with that, too.