Although I wasn't born and raised in Boston, in many ways, I consider Boston to be my home. Boston was where I decided to become a composer, and I owe almost the entirety of my early development to the many performers, presenters, professors, and colleagues in this city. dirty water is the first piece of mine to be performed in Boston since I left for San Diego to start my PhD just over a year ago, and I'm delighted and honored that Amy and Matt are giving its premiere. While it does not use any material from The Standells' hit, it is inspired by the song's quirky, grungy, playful ubiquity, and ultimately, by the city that I love.
- Tina Tallon
Tina Tallon (b. 1990) is a Boston-area composer, computer musician, vocalist, and improviser. Born and raised in Pasadena, MD, she began playing the piano at age four and the violin at seven, although she received no formal training in composition or theory until late in her undergraduate studies at MIT, where she studied biological engineering and spent time researching the biomolecular bases of pancreatic cancer and endometriosis.
In 2010, one of her biological engineering professors invited her to compose a piece of sound art for the League of Imaginary Scientists to accompany a science-meets-art exhibit relating the surface of gram-negative bacteria to close-up views of the Martian landscape at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Her music has since been widely performed internationally by ensembles and musicians such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, wild Up, the LA Philharmonic New Music Group, Talea, soprano Tony Arnold, HOCKET Duo, the Calder Quartet, the Hausmann Quartet, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, members of the JACK Quartet, the h2 quartet, and Transient Canvas, among many others. Her first string quartet, selective defrosting, won grand prize in the 2013 PARMA Student Composer Competition and her dissertation, luscinia, won a 2018 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. She was also the recipient of a 2016 Barlow Endowment General Commission to support the composition of new work for violist and composer Kurt Rohde for viola and live electronics. Other recent commissioners include the LA Philharmonic, Guerilla Opera, Steven Schick and the La Jolla Symphony, the Peabody Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, and Intersection. Festival appearances include IRCAM’s ManiFeste, the LA Philharmonic’s National Composers Intensive, soundSCAPE festival, New Music on the Point, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Art of Migration Festival at UC Davis. In addition to grants from Brandeis University, Tina won one of four inaugural Katzin Prize Fellowships to fund her research at UCSD and remains the only recipient in the arts to date. She went on to receive a 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the 2021-2022 Frederic A. Julliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Rome for her scholarly and artistic work on biases in voice technology.
Ms. Tallon is active as not only a composer and passionate advocate for new music, but also as a vocalist, violinist, arts administrator, educator, and arts documentarian. She began singing in 2008, and received an MIT Emerson Scholarship to study voice in 2010. She frequently performed as a soloist with the MIT Chamber Chorus and Concert Choir, and has performed with Bang On A Can, Collage New Music, kallisti Opera, the Men in Blaque, and many others. Additionally, from 2011-2013, she served as Assistant to the Artistic Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and an assistant producer for the Grammy-winning BMOP/sound label. She also served as general manager of San Diego’s Fresh Sound Music series from 2014-2016. She has also served as an arts and technology entrepreneurship coach for MIT Bootcamps, an initiative of MIT Open Learning. Additionally, recognizing the challenges posed by lack of access to sophisticated, nuanced, and affordable documentation services for emerging and underrepresented artists, she founded SALT Arts Documentation, an outfit that specializes in creating artistically-informed audiovisual recordings of contemporary performing arts and training these artists in audio engineering, videography, photography, and web design. She has worked with countless nonprofits, arts groups, and presenting organizations around the world, and her media have been published by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and many others. Prior to beginning her career as a musician, her research in pancreatic cancer won the Alexander J. Denner Award from MIT, and she has developed computational tools to model both cancer metastasis and stem cell differentiation, in addition to novel noninvasive diagnostic agents for endometriosis.
Dr. Tallon’s research interests include technological mediation of the human voice, virtual tactility, data sonification, algorithmic composition and artificial intelligence, disability, and uncovering hidden biases in both hardware and software development. She received one of four inaugural Katzin Prize fellowships to fund her doctoral research at UC San Diego, and she remains the only recipient in the arts to date. Her research has been featured in The New Yorker, NPR’s On The Media, Politico, and TheNextWeb, and recent international public speaking appearances include two keynotes at the Iceland Airwaves PRO conference in Reykjavík and the MIT-Grafenegg Forum in Austria. After graduating, she was hired by the MIT Music and Theater Arts section to develop curriculum for a class in computational musicology to be taught by associate professor Michael Scott Cuthbert, under whom she also served as a research assistant and programmer for the music21 computer-aided musicology project. Tina holds S. B. degrees in Biological Engineering and Music from MIT, and an M.F.A in Composition and Music Theory from Brandeis University. Her primary teachers include Peter Child, David Rakowski, and Lei Liang, and she has studied computer music with Miller Puckette and Tom Erbe. Beginning in Fall 2021, she will serve as Assistant Professor of AI and the Arts at the University of Florida. She previously served as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Clark University, and Lecturer in Music Technology at MIT.