Composer Profiles

Mary Jane Leach

Mary Jane Leach
Photo: Marion Ettlinger

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Mary Jane Leach

RealAudio3 comments by the composer, 4:22. (RA2/14.4 version)
RealAudio 3 stereo version of Green Mountain Madrigal, 8:44.
RealAudio 3 mono version of Green Mountain Madrigal.
Mary Jane Leach's home page.

Mary Jane Leach is a composer/performer originally from Vermont who has lived in New York since the mid-1970's. She lived in Cologne, Germany, in 1989/90 as Composer in Residence at Sankt Peter Köln. Her compositions have been performed in North America, Europe, Australia, South America, and Japan. The New York Treble Singers, Shannon Peet, Bel Canto, Relâche, Bermuda Triangle, and Guy Klucevsek are among those who have performed her work. On the radio, her music has been heard on NPR, CBC (Canada), Radio Bremen, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

She is concerned with the total environment of a concert, visual as well as aural. Her works explore the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. Space is also an important concern: how sound changes when it is moved around a room. She makes hand-painted slides that are shown in pairs, to make a continuously evolving configuration. The image on the cover of "Celestial Fires" (below) is taken from one of her slides.