Music on the boundary of genre.

Emily Cardwell

Emily Cardwell began her musical career as a classical vocalist, performing with ACDA National Honor Choir, Texas Hill Country Youth Choir, Louisiana State University Chorus, Canto Choir, and Texas State University Singers. Emily performed in Amahl and the Night Visitors (Fredericksburg, TX, 2007), La Cenerentola (Lenox, MA, 2009), and Radamisto (Arezzo, Italy, 2011). Emily then specialized in chamber recitals performing modern, romantic, and early music. In 2012, she wrote her first art song, which inspired her to begin formal composition studies.

Emily discovered her own eclectic compositional style by studying ethnomusicology and performing with improv and non-western ensembles, and studying classical and experimental composition at Texas State University and then Sarah Lawrence College. While at Sarah Lawrence, Emily discovered the boundless possibilities of electronics in composition, and began creating “fixed” electro-acoustic pieces and multi-media installations. She collaborated with visual artists, filmmakers, choreographers, and other musicians in the New York City area, and began conducting her own and others’ works for both improvisational and classical ensembles. Since then, Emily has performed with, composed for, and conducted diverse ensembles: from NYC-based Trilogy Ensemble, Sarah Lawrence Jazz Vocal Ensemble, and the Sarah Lawrence Orchestra to the Mills College Graduate Improvisation Ensemble and the Rodrigo Barriga Quartet.

Emily Cardwell is an alumna of the young artists vocal program at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (2009), and obtained her BA in music composition and experimental music at Sarah Lawrence College in 2016. She received her MFA in electronic music and recording media at Mills College in Oakland, California in January of 2020. She has studied composition with Russell Riepe, John Yannelli, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, Laetitia Sonami, and John Bischoff; conducting with Martin Goldray; and improvisation with Katherine Westwater, Zeena Parkins, and Tomeka Reid.

Emily’s current works are inspired by her myriad interests in aesthetics, mental health, politics, environmentalism, vulnerability, futurism, globalism, experimentation, folk music, feminism, humanism, and psychoacoustics of singing. She began self-producing and publishing through Thistledown Productions in 2017 and in 2021 and 2022, she released two EPs and composed an electro-acoustic commission for a photography exhibit at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts.

She is currently residing in Berlin, Germany and working as a freelance music publisher, composer, vocalist, and producer.