Katherine Balch Photo: Kate L Photography

CHARACTER SKETCH

A Compleat Musician

NAME: Katherine Balch, A14

CHOSEN PROFESSION: Composer

CLOSE SECOND: An academic career in political theory and intellectual history. In fact, she’s been known to use philosophical sources in her musical compositions. One theater piece intertwines texts from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

HEADY MOMENTS: Hearing her piano concerto premiered at Carnegie Hall; directing and producing her chamber opera, The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year, at New England Conservatory; coauthoring a paper on Rousseau and Montesquieu that appeared in the peer-reviewed journal History of European Ideas.

CREATIVE CHALLENGE: The beginning stages of composing a work. “I often find that there is a big, foggy mass of sound in my head and I have no idea how to ‘transcribe’ it.”

WHAT SHE’S LEARNED: “You can’t overthink things. In the words of the composer George Crumb: Sometimes, to write music, you gotta be a little bit dumb.”

CURRENTLY IN THE WORKS: A master’s degree at the Yale School of Music and several projects, among them a string quartet to be performed at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and a piece for France’s Ensemble Intercontemporain.