About the Artist

With an unusual background as both an academically trained composer with a history of important commissions, and as an improvising harpist active in the diverse realms of non-traditional jazz, free-form experimental, improvised and classical music, LeBaron's work is infused with a broad palette of time and place. From Concerto for Active Frogs, which married a score of actual frog calls with live performers, to her blues opera, The E & O Line, in which train whistles metamorphose into live vocalizations, her compositions are saturated with vital, vivid life. As both a performer and composer, LeBaron draws her inspiration from a global cornucopia: Noh plays, Antonin Artaud, the French surrealist poets, religious history, ecology, and American popular music.

"I desire my music, my sound environments, and my works of music theater to truly engage listeners. To make this to happen, I alternate between the roles of creator and listener during the composing process. This attunement to a listener's perceptions is essential to the underlying psychological sense of pacing, inherent in creations dealing with time. The result is an intuitive balance between meeting the listener's expectations and providing unanticipated material, which in turn creates new expectations. "