Composer Yvette Janine Jackson speaks multiple aural languages: improvised and notated, acoustic and electroacoustic, orchestral and chamber music. One encounters her work in concert halls and theatres as well as in galleries, museums, and public art displays. Her ongoing ‘radio operas,’ long form narrative compositions, interweave music, sound design, and Foley with sound bites, computerized voices, and actors and singers who give voice to historical speeches, legal documents, religious texts, news media, oral histories and field recordings. These profoundly immersive soundscape compositions -often performed as multichannel fixed media experiences and installations in darkened spaces evoking the Golden Age of radio drama- suffuse environments with sound and text that conjure images in the minds of listeners. The work holds up a mirror to both past and present-day society: from the Middle Passage to climate change denial, from the trafficking and enslavement of Africans in the Americas to the removal of historical events from textbooks, from the writings of Black queer science fiction pioneer Samuel Delany to the ongoing undoing of civil protections.

Yvette formed Radio Opera Workshop in 2019 to explore the interdisciplinary potential of her narrative compositions.  Beyond a traditional ensemble, Radio Opera Workshop blends music with lighting, visuals, and other collaborative disciplines in order to create performances for stage, recordings, and film.

photo by E. Divine