Catherine Lamb

In the music of Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Washington USA), the mathematics of harmony are explored through the physicality of the material world. Lamb gives voice to crystalline structures of the harmonic series through subtleties of friction, pressure, breath, and bow changes that shape how the idealized harmonies speak. The musical forms she constructs connect the sonic with the tactile and the visual, rendering transparent what once was opaque, transmuting flesh to bone, passing from shadow into light. These dualities and metaphors reflect Lamb’s deep interest in the fundamental nature of sound and often find themselves in the titles of her pieces: shade/gradient (2012), point/wave (2015), interius/exterius (2022).

Lamb’s approach to tuning and pacing are informed by her studies with microtonal composer James Tenney and experimental filmmaker and Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul at the California Institute of the Arts. Like her mentors, Lamb has been a champion of the music of others, an ardent collaborator, and a key figure in various vibrant musical communities. While living in Los Angeles, Lamb co-founded singing by numbers, a women’s choir that aimed to create new pedagogical approaches to microtonal singing with vocalists from a wide range of musical backgrounds. The convergence of musical explorations with feminist practices is also found in her collaboration with violinist and violist Johnny Chang, in which they “recover and interpret” the long-forgotten music of a fictitious female musician, Viola Torros. In doing so, they question and blur the origins of early European music and call attention to the exclusion of real female musicians in the historical record.

Lamb is one of the most celebrated and in-demand composers of her generation. Her work has been commissioned by premiere new music ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Dedalus, and Ensemble Musikfabrik. Her writings and recordings are published in KunstMusik, Open Space Magazine, New World Records, Another Timbre, Other Minds, Sound American, and Sacred Realism. In 2016 to 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2018, she was given a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Composer’s Prize. She currently resides in Berlin where she contributes to many new-music initiatives including the experimental music label Sacred Realism and the Harmonic Space Orchestra.

-written by friends Laura Steenberge and Michael Winter, summer 2023