Biography
Brian Harnetty, an American composer working across disciplines in sound art, first shaped pieces that combined assorted instruments with discovered audio fragments to investigate literary passages, musical lineages, and landscape features. His wider recognition arrived with the 2009 album Silent City and the 2013 release The Star-Faced One: From the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives, both issued by Atavistic and centered on Chicago as their primary territory of sonic investigation. While retaining core methods from those projects, his later output has shifted so that the material now arises straight from archival sound collections rooted in the specific communities they document, most often in Appalachia and the Midwest.
These interdisciplinary projects draw on myth, memory, ecology, economy, and an egalitarian view of class that treats the layered past of a locale and its inhabitants as a route toward social connection and reform. He received a Bachelor of Music from Ohio State University and completed a Masters degree at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, where Michael Finnissy and Robert Saxton served as instructors and Steve Martland provided additional mentorship. At Ohio University he earned a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts with emphasis on sonic ethnography, sound studies, and sound art.
Rawhead & Bloodybones, issued in 2015 on Dust-To-Digital, wove sampled rural folk narratives and field recordings into newly written music that framed stories recounted by children in the 1940s. Shawnee, Ohio, released in 2019, formed a sonic portrait—spanning past and present, actual and invented—of one modest Appalachian town in the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Eight months after the Wayne National Forest EP appeared in 2021 came the standalone single “Forest Listening Rooms.” Words and Silences, issued in 2022, constructed a sonic and musical portrait of Trappist monk, mystic, and author Thomas Merton by threading 1967 archival tape recordings of his reflections on numerous topics, made at his hermitage inside Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani, through a cycle of newly composed music for piano, reeds, and brass; the package also contained a 48-page letterpress chapbook that includes an extended essay by Harnetty on the work’s creation together with transcriptions of Merton’s monologues.
These interdisciplinary projects draw on myth, memory, ecology, economy, and an egalitarian view of class that treats the layered past of a locale and its inhabitants as a route toward social connection and reform. He received a Bachelor of Music from Ohio State University and completed a Masters degree at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, where Michael Finnissy and Robert Saxton served as instructors and Steve Martland provided additional mentorship. At Ohio University he earned a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts with emphasis on sonic ethnography, sound studies, and sound art.
Rawhead & Bloodybones, issued in 2015 on Dust-To-Digital, wove sampled rural folk narratives and field recordings into newly written music that framed stories recounted by children in the 1940s. Shawnee, Ohio, released in 2019, formed a sonic portrait—spanning past and present, actual and invented—of one modest Appalachian town in the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Eight months after the Wayne National Forest EP appeared in 2021 came the standalone single “Forest Listening Rooms.” Words and Silences, issued in 2022, constructed a sonic and musical portrait of Trappist monk, mystic, and author Thomas Merton by threading 1967 archival tape recordings of his reflections on numerous topics, made at his hermitage inside Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani, through a cycle of newly composed music for piano, reeds, and brass; the package also contained a 48-page letterpress chapbook that includes an extended essay by Harnetty on the work’s creation together with transcriptions of Merton’s monologues.
Albums
