Bethany Younge Joins Music Department

The Department of Music and the Graduate Program in Digital Musics are thrilled to welcome a new Technical Director: composer and creative sound technologist Bethany Younge. As Technical Director, Younge will work with undergraduate musicians as well as graduate students in the Digital Musics Program to manage the Department's music technology resources, oversee the BritTrax Recording Studio, and shepherd students in their creative music-technology endeavors. We congratulate Bethany and wish her a warm welcome to our musical community.

Bethany Younge's acoustic and electronic music explores the manifold kinesthetic properties of musical performance. For her, the act of music-making cannot be divorced from the physical presence of the human instigator. Her works often incorporate instrumental deconstruction, exaggerated movement, motion tracking, sounding costumes, and/or other aesthetic devices to sonically heighten corporeal expressivity.

Younge is currently pursuing her DMA in Music Composition at Columbia University in New York. She has received a master's degree in Music Composition from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, The Netherlands and a Bachelor's degree in Music Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. She has studied composition closely with George Lewis, Zosha Di Castri, Richard Barrett, Martijn Padding, Yannis Kyriakides, Peter Adriaansz, Lewis Nielson, and Seung-Ah Oh.

Her works have been featured in the 2020 National Sawdust New Works Commission, the Long Beach Opera Songbook, the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Resonant Bodies Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The 16th International Young Composers Meeting, and many other festivals. She has worked with ensembles including JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, TILT Brass, KLANG, Ereprijs Orkestra, Fonema Consort, AndPlay, Chartreuse, Gyre Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Mocrep, and others throughout Europe and the USA. She has been awarded the Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, the Kanter/Mivos Prize, and the Barcelona Festival Mixtur Commission Award. Most recently she was nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award. Younge's work has been mentioned in both The New York Times and The Chicago Reader, and has been listed in The New Yorker.