Adrian Coburn writes music. She was born in 1982. She was friends with Lee Evans in New Hampshire, and studied with an Ann whose teacher’s teacher’s teacher… etc. was Beethoven. Then she went to Stanford. There she learned from Adam Gilbert. Then she got a graduate degree in composition in Texas.

Her grandfather liked Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna and played them for the cows in the barn to help them give milk.  Her favorite record growing up was the 2001: A Space Odyssey Soundtrack

First piece of hers performed at a concert: Six variations on a minor sixth, sounded serial, in response to Sven Ingo-Koch’s directive to, as Melissa Hui put it, “explode” the music.

Successful and fun improvisor and performer at school, then… what to do after? Study voice? Okay, Anne Marie Ketchum in Pasadena. No one that she met in daily life had met a composer before, so she slowly stopped becoming one.

Time to learn how to play music: opera singing, temperament, viola, bucket drumming, improvising, teaching. Go so far away that you forgot where you came from. “Didn’t you used to compose?” asked Aaron Finbloom.

Graduate school, a beginning to start learning to compose. Graduate recital. Family. It would be nice to get another degree, but it isn’t essential. One professor knew the Liber Usualis backward and forward. Repertoire. Only within a language can one say something and be understood. Listening and writing about rock and roll, soul. The fount of The Temptations.

She likes videogames.