UC San Diego

This dissertation is a biography of the California E.A.R. Unit (1981-2012), a contemporary music ensemble founded by graduate students at the California Institute of the Arts. Arguably one of the first of its kind in Los Angeles, the EAR Unit gained international recognition for its eclectic programming and versatility in a wide range of avant-garde styles. I examine its career in the context of expanding institutional support for contemporary music in Los Angeles throughout the 1980s, as well as increased national focus on composition in academia. To begin, I show that CalArts made the EAR Unit’s cohort the central focus of its new graduate curriculum in contemporary music, offering the students unlimited access to dozens of internationally recognized composers at the yearly Contemporary Music Festivals. My writing follows the EAR Unit through its other institutional affiliations, which included the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Monday Evening Concerts, Music in Motion, and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex. Combining interviews and archival research, this biography highlights strategies musicians used to navigate the growing infrastructure for contemporary classical concert music on an increasingly globalized stage. I attend to the texture of these experiences, and how this type of institutionalized creative work was both exciting and motivating. In doing so, I offer biography as a powerful tool for understanding the historical precursors to modern iterations of the contemporary music ensemble.