Darcy Copeland
Darcy Copeland is an experimental composer raised in rural Michigan and now based in Boston, MA. She composes music as a means to excavate and contextualize her inner experiences of the self and to explore the strangeness and beauty of thinking, moving, feeling, and being in a ravaged world. She hears her work as a site of possibility for imagined futures, as well as an opportunity to unravel the unknown of herself and make sense of our world in ways not accessible through language.
Copeland is also an artist-scholar, conducting research within the fields of sound studies, musicology, affect theory, philosophy, new materialism, Indigenous studies, and deep ecology. Her dissertation research approaches sound making and musical world building as a process of emergence and becoming with implications that extend beyond the musical work/world itself and into the interdependent relationships underpinning all living and non-living things.
She has built an international career with premieres and performances in Slovenia, Brazil, Spain, Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Japan, and Canada along with performances in venues across the United States. Her work has been influenced and enriched by the relationships she has developed in working closely with ensembles and performers such as .abeceda ensemble, Duo XAMP, Ben Roidl-Ward, William Teixeira, catinblack ensemble, collective lovemusic, Broken Frames Syndicate, Lamnth, Zone Expérimentale, Ensemble Dal Niente, loadbang ensemble, Nois~ saxophone quartet, and line upon line percussion trio.
She is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, working closely with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku. She holds a master of music in composition from the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, where she studied with Joël François-Durand and Huck Hodge, and a bachelor of music in composition from Columbia College Chicago, where she studied with Eliza Brown, Kenn Kumpf, and Daniel R. DeHaan. She has also participated in masterclasses and lessons with Malin Bång (2021), Clara Ionnatta (2021), Georges Aperghis (2021), Amy Williams (2018), and Samuel Carl Adams (2017) and been in residence at festivals such as Festival MIXTUR, .abeceda contemporary music week, Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP), Four Corners Ensemble composition academy, Luxembourg Composition Academy, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
In addition to her creative and scholarly research, she is the director of the Harvard Group for New Music, a position she has held since April 2024. In her free time, she enjoys birdwatching, going to the movie theatre, baking, and pointing out varieties of moss on her walks.