In a visually dominated world, sound as an immersive, experiential medium offers a means of cultivating connection, place, and presence.
photo by Maria Nikolic, 2023
Darcy Copeland (b. 1996) is an American experimental composer hailing from rural Michigan and now based in urban Boston. She writes music to excavate internal selfhood and explore outward expressions of thinking, moving, feeling, and being in a ravaged world. Working with acoustic instruments, electronics, and visuals, her work interrogates themes of vulnerability, materiality, and affect. She is fascinated by the use of oblique and roving expressions of duration, timbre, and texture to create experiential sonic worlds.
She is also a scholar and at times a performer utilizing voice, electronics, cello, and the accordion. Her research within fields of philosophy, new materialism, and cosmology and has informed her recent works with a focus on musical ecologies, activism, and embodiment.
In 2022, Darcy joined the PhD program in composition at Harvard University, studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku. She holds a master of music in composition from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and a bachelor of music in composition from Columbia College Chicago. She is currently the director of the Harvard Group for New Music (HGNM).
She enjoys sci-fi and samurai films, green spaces, the first snow of the year, and baking.