About Lainie Fefferman
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My name is Lainie (pronounced “LAY-nee”) Fefferman. I was born in New York City in 1982 and my pronouns are she/her. I love music.
I’m drawn to artistic experiences that are either extremely minimalist or extremely maximalist. I love process pieces that wear their structures and conceits on their sleeves, and I love wacky patchwork quilts of whimsy, built from idiosyncratic intuitions. I love abstraction and rigor; I love narrative and documentary. As a listener, a watcher, an audience member, a fan, I just want to be subsumed into someone else’s world – I’m much less concerned with what the world looks like than the wondrous feeling of being firmly lost within it.
I’m a music maker, advocate, and teacher. I’m a Jew and a lover of mathematics. I’m a baker and a third generation American. I love to laugh, but even more: I love to make others laugh and feel full.
I make music by putting dots on lines (mostly Euro-classical staff notation), drawing curves in software (mostly Reaper with fun plugins and endless automation), writing code in boxes (mostly Max MSP and soon RNBO), and finding new and surprising ways to wiggle my vocal chords (surprising to me, at least). I make music for myself and for other people, for acoustic instruments and electronic instruments, for live performance and static albums. I’m less interested in the instrumentation or scope of a commission than the people who commission it. I want to work with kind, curious compatriots who are committed to making new sounds with me in a spirit of fun and collaborative commitment; a lot of my musical philosophy and family are centered around the warm and wacky Bang on a Can universe. I’ve been lucky to make music for and with glorious folks like this, including: Space Lazers, Recap Quartet, TRANSIT New Music, Greg Oakes, JACK Quartet, Kamilla Akru, Transient Canvas, Aaron Larget-Caplan, Ensemble Decipher, Tenth Intervention, " Sō Percussion, Sideband, Make Music New York, Experiments in Opera, ETHEL, Kathleen Supové, TILT Brass, James Moore, Eleonore Oppenheim, and Dither.
I advocate for music and the people who make it by organizing musical events. From 2010 to 2016 I co-organized the New Music Bake Sale in Brooklyn – it was an annual event something like a bazaar, with scheduled performances and fun raffles, but also with lots of tables rented out by ensembles and presenters, composers and venues, where they shared their music and sold their baked goods (or sometimes tacos). It was a way to bring lots of disparate music-making corners of the world into a single tasty space for a day where no one had even a pretense of formality – I loved it. From 2010 to 2020 I started and co-ran a New Music cooperative space in downtown Brooklyn called Exapno. Exapno was a magical spot in a giant, rundown building on Flatbush Ave where the landlord, Al Attara, gave us a home to invite those without their own space and resources to come do their musical things (practicing, composing, performing). Exapno shut down when the pandemic began in NYC in 2020. Now, since 2014, I’ve been co-organizing another annual event, one that travels to different places in the US each year: New Music Gathering. NMG is a beautiful chaos of concerts, talks, panels, choreographed socializing, and nerdy dance parties. I love it and a lot of my blood, sweat, and screen time go into running this beast. My work is largely practical and organizational, but throughout work I’m always questioning and rethinking how to make this kind of thing more fun, more interesting, more accessible, and more inviting to as many people as possible.
I currently teach and advise a fabulous bunch of music makers and thinkers as a professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology, a university in Hoboken that is generally known as an engineering school. Being technically-minded in music classrooms suits me so well – before I taught composition and electronic music, I was a math teacher, showing calculus to 12th graders, fractals to sixth graders, and binary to 4th graders at Saint Ann’s school in Brooklyn Heights. A lot of the way I see the world and think about pedagogy comes from the beautiful, artsy-fartsy, world-loving community that embraced me there. I had a wonderful time getting my doctorate in composition from Princeton University – that bunch is a hoot – and did my undergrad at Yale, where I studied both composition and Near Eastern Languages.
I love math.
I love baking.
I love being a Jew.
I love being an American citizen.
I know that a lot of people don’t have reason or space to love being or doing these things, and I see it as part of my honor and responsibility in the world to:
• Make these identities and activities broader, fairer, kinder, and more accessible to more people
• Share my passion for these things with as many people as possible
Follow me on social media (links below) to join me as I post and repost content relating to these identities and passions.
And if you’d like to get in touch, email is the best way!
lainie [at] lainiefefferman [dot] com
Thanks for taking the time to read this, thanks for visiting my site, and I hope you find joy and good tunes as you venture on with your day!
