New classical music has seldom been so darkly and playfully entertaining. A second piano-and-violin piece, Devil in the Belfry, blends the otherworldliness of Federico Mompou with scampering phantasmagoria, illustrating the diabolical clock chimes from another Poe short story, an all-too-familiar narrative of conformity and its crushing consequences. LeBaron couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate historical moment to release it.
Read More"LeBaron’s I Am an American — My Government Will Reward You summoned ghosts while prodding us to think about today’s headlines. Using objects and extended techniques (the least of them plucking and strumming the strings), along with electronic processing, LeBaron turned her sound into physical presence, lightened by hints of pop harmonies and jazz-like improvisation. I Am an American… is above all what art cannot do without being: provocative and thoughtful."
Marcus Overton, San Diego Union-Tribune, 2018
Read More"Her set-up included two concert harps side-by-side and a dozen or so implements to apply to the strings and bodies of the harps. Le Barons’s fascinating solo consisted of a mixture of harp plucking gestures using patterns derived from oriental-sounding scales alongside bowing, scraping and percussive effects."
Loud Mouth: Music Trust E-Zine, 2017
Read More“Cutting-edge composer, improvising harpist, writer and lecturer Anne LeBaron tells Limelight about her involvement in Perth's Totally Huge New Music Festival as one of the Festival's featured artists. She will discuss composing in a post-truth world and perform her work inspired by a military "blood chit".”
LIMELIGHT: Australia’s Classical Music and Arts Magazine, 2017
Read More“US west coast composer and harpist LeBaron will not only present cutting-edge performance work at the THNMF; she will also work with local artists before it, developing new work for the festival. In addition, she’s the keynote speaker at the festival conference and will present university and public masterclasses, workshops and lectures.”
William Yeoman, The West Australian, 2017
Read More“LeBaron served as international featured artist and composer-in-residence for the annual festival, which brings together musicians, critics, academics and others to “discuss the ideas that underline contemporary new music and sound art—the histories, methods, theories, approaches, techniques and dreams that make up the modern world of music and sound arts.”
Katie Dunham, 24700: News from California Institute of the Arts, 2017
Read More"Musicians like Evan Parker and Anne LeBaron and Charlotte Hug and Joe McPhee and Milford Graves and Han Bennink and Peter Brötzmann and George Lewis and Steve Beresford and Paul Lovens are among the great artists of our era. It may be awhile before history recognizes them for this, but I’m confident that it will come to pass.”
Rhys Tranter interviews John Corbett, Sequenza21 , 2017
Read More“It was a big weekend for LeBaron. Scenes from her provocative "LSD: The Opera" were staged Friday and Saturday at REDCAT in Los Angeles. For her new song cycle, she picked five poems by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet who mingled sensuality with spirituality, his writing sharing, perhaps with LSD, the capacity to alter one's perception of the world by drawing attention to small details.
"The vocal writing evokes the unexpected. Throughout the fives songs, LeBaron's pitches reflect Rumi's new creatures that "whirl in from nonexistence." In one song, a thirsty man picks walnuts from a tree not for sustenance but for the music they make when thrown into a pool. LeBaron has the singers place stones on piano strings and reflect in their voices the haunting string resonances.
"Poems are rough notations for the music we are," Rumi ends the beautiful final song of the cycle. LeBaron let the sentiment resonate, as though it might ring on and on as motto for singers in a celestial SongFest."
Mark Swed, LA Times, 2015
Read More“Even this partial dose of "LSD" is already powerful music theater. The libretto by Gerd Stern, Ed Rosenfeld and LeBaron has a sense of vivid authenticity. The drug is, moreover, given an intriguing feminist spirit. A trio of female singers personify LSD and the experience it provides. Pinchot Meyer and Laura Huxley serve as the true guiding spirits to the needy, lecherous Leary and Aldous Huxley. The Partch instruments provide the perfect complement for a substance of mysterious political, psychic and social power.”
LA Times, 2015
Read More“Finally, there was Anne LeBaron's acid trip that many in the audience had been clearly waiting for. She had composed the Industry's first opera, "Crescent City." In "LSD: The Opera," she expands consciousness with an expanded orchestra, incorporating Harry Partch's gorgeously weird microtonal instruments into the orchestra in a way no one has thought of before.”
LA Times, 2015
Read More“Anne LeBaron is a composer as transformer. She transforms instruments, such as putting objects on the strings of the harp to tease out hidden sounds. She transforms cultural contexts, be they Kazakh, Bach, or Katrina.
"She deals with what we know, with issues of our time and place. But her knack is for alternative realities, showing us the here and now from a point just slightly off the beaten track.
"There is, in LeBaron's music, a leaving the body and a celebration of the body, meditations on death and breath. Laura Huxley's aria was followed by a bassoon duet that, with the added benefit of electronics, mimicked the sounds of frogs and hysterical monkeys. It was amazing.”
LA Times, Apr. 15, 2014
Read More“She is on the wavelength of most of our musical institutions. She is a favorite of Southwest Chamber Music. Her environmentally mystical opera “Wet” had its premiere at REDCAT in 2005. Two years ago, she made a real splash with her hyper-opera “Crescent City,” performed by L.A.’s vital new experimental opera company, the Industry.”
LA Times, Apr. 15, 2014
Read More“The big buzz last year, however, was Crescent City, the Industry’s first production in an old warehouse in Atwater Crossing [ii]. Its composer Anne LeBaron is a New Orleanian who now teaches at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) based in Santa Clarita in one of Los Angeles’ northern valleys. A former student of Mauricio Kagel and György Ligeti, LeBaron has pushed the boundaries not only of opera, but of instrumental music. I heard her monodrama Some Things Should Not Move (about her experiences in a haunted apartment in Vienna) at The Colburn School’s Zipper Hall in March and can well understand how an eventual production of that opera, when it is complete, might make a virtue of positioning the audience in a haunted space (if indeed that’s the direction it goes in).”
Symphony Services International, 2013
Read More“The best of the new works was American Icons by Anne LeBaron. If there is an “it” composer in Southern California right now, she’d hold the title, so it is more than a little surprising that this was the first time any of her compositions had been performed by the LA Phil. Better late than never. This is a clever work, drawing sounds and rhythms that are clearly evocative of a variety of American musical genres without sounding like an over-intellectual parody. The contrasting sounds blend and crash into each other in complex yet entertaining ways. It is a compact tour de force.”
All is Yar, 2012
Read More“Anne LeBaron's "American Icons" — a fanfare commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Kennedy Center in Washington and premiered in 1996 when Slatkin was music director of the National Symphony — is a four-minute musical firecracker of hepped-up fragments of '50s pop music bashing heads. An organ blasts through it, Hammond-like. It's a riot, and as happily far from Beethoven as you could possibly imagine.”
LA Times, 2012
Read More“Anne LeBaron, on the faculty at CalArts, happens to be the local composer of the moment with her breathtaking opera "Crescent City" currently in production and a piece on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's opening Hollywood Bowl concert in July…LeBaron's "Solar Music," which featured flutist Larry Kaplan and harpist Alison Bjorkedal, is full of striking, emphatic tonal colors.”
LA Times, 2012
Read More“I thought the opera’s score to be superb. It could easily be staged in a conventional manner…”
David Gregson, Opera West, 2012
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