The Music of Carla Kihlstedt

Composer, performer, improviser Carla Kihlstedt winds up a three-day residency with a concert of her music, performed with Contemporary Improvisation students and faculty, reflecting the incredible breadth of her artistic voice.

About Carla Kihlstedt

Carla Kihlstedt is a composer, songwriter, improviser, singer and violinist. She is a veteran of folk/pop, rock/metal, contemporary/classical, and improvised/experimental music, and is pleased that spouting a long list of genres is increasingly meaningless.

Though she graduated from Oberlin Conservatory of Music with a degree in classical violin performance, her creative life has taken a very circuitous path since then. She is a founding member of the bands Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Tin Hat, Rabbit Rabbit Radio, Causing a Tiger, The Book of Knots, Minamo and 2 Foot Yard.

She enjoys writing large-scale collaborative pieces that pull from her various musical influences and interests and explore a single idea from many angles. Her recent compositions, including Herring Run (for the San Francisco Girls Chorus) and Black Inscription (written in Matthias Bossi and Jeremy Flower), investigate our connection to the natural world. Her band Rabbit Rabbit Radio releases a song on the first day of every month through Bandcamp.com.

Carla is on the faculty of the Contemporary Improvisation department at NEC, the MFA composition program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Creative Gesture Lab at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity.