A Little Bit About Me

Kate Pukinskis

Professional Student. (Probably for the rest of my life.)

I am a Masters student in Music Composition at the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon University. I got my BFA in Composition at Carnegie Mellon as well, graduating in May 2008 and heading straight in to the MM. As an undergrad, I studied composition with Nancy Galbraith for the three years I was here and Geoff Poole at the University of Bristol in England during my junior year. Currently, I study composition with the head of the school, Dr. Zahler.

This independent study idea came mostly out of my experience in our advisor's graduate theory seminar class last semester. He came in as a new teacher in the fall and I needed a theory course to take; why not Postmodernism from the New Guy? The class was fantastic; I actually looked forward to "geeking out" every Thursday afternoon for two hours. The class was small enough and the students just stubborn enough that we had some pretty fantastic discussion, including the infamous "what is art?"/"what is music?" topic. (I still don't know.) Either way, I was hooked on all of it and got a kick out of thinking about performances that were attended underwater, pieces of music that begin with tiger purrs, and what happens when you give a percussionist an impossible line to play.

As a final project, I wrote a piece for two voices and instrument(yes, I was that specific) called "PostSecret." It is based on twenty secrets posted either in the PostSecret books or at PostSecret.com, and it features the type of organization that Stockhausen or Xenakis would be proud of. I had only ever written "standard notation" scores before, so drawing shapes and staves with only two lines, or allowing the players to order their pages in any way they wanted(except #7 which had to be in the 7th place) was new for me. I had a blast.

With that said, my partner in crime Joelle wrote a paper on the question "What is Music." (you'll have to ask her if she knows now.) We both were hugely inspired by the topics brought up in that fall grad theory seminar and wanted to pursue it further. In need of filling out our course schedules, an independent study was just what we needed and obviously the New Guy was the one to be our advisor.

And that's why we're here. With the blog. And the graphic score. (More on that later.)