micro/Maker by Loose Leaf Transmissions

Austin Hammonds opens up about what it really means to take ownership of a creative career — after years of working under others, learning the ropes, and navigating industry instability. He shares the courage it takes to step out on your own, the deep self-reflection behind that decision, and how family, mentors, and curiosity continue to shape his evolving path as a composer. micro/Maker episodes...

Jessica Ackerley applied to an Arctic residency on a whim, partly motivated by a childhood spent reading Farley Mowat's accounts of Northern Canada and a long-held desire to reach the polar regions. What they found in Svalbard, Norway — one of the furthest points north on the planet — was almost the inverse of what they'd imagined: the gap between preconceived idea and lived experience became the...

Hannah Boissonneault describes how her songwriting and concert music practices have become more unified over time — and how improvisation has remained at the heart of both. She shares how voice memos, nontraditional instruments, and a love for slow-moving harmony help her tap into musical intuition. Whether writing a fixed media piece or recording with her band, she embraces the same curiosity, la...

Through his Vital Organ Project, composer and organist Graeme Shields is reintroducing audiences to an instrument that’s often misunderstood—or overlooked entirely. He and Tyler talk about making the organ accessible outside of church walls, connecting with new audiences, and showing that this centuries-old instrument still has a vital place in today’s musical landscape. micro/Maker episodes relea...

Nicky Sohn traces a real shift in how she lives and works back to meeting her husband Nate, whose ordinary nine-to-five routine — gym at six, regular hours, a clean line between work and the rest of life — struck her as almost unbelievable after years immersed entirely in musician culture, where identity and self-worth get tied up completely in career outcomes. Watching her brother Justin's old ni...

Han Hitchen shares how his identity as a queer, transgender, nonbinary man has shaped his music, from early subconscious works to intentional explorations of belonging and transformation. He reflects on the freedom he’s found in embracing both masculinity and femininity, and how composition became a vehicle for expressing identity with honesty and depth. For Han, music is not just notes on a page—...

Michael Frazier outlines three guiding pillars that now shape his creative life: fun, patience, and the embrace of identity. Reflecting on earlier periods where composition felt more dutiful than joyful, he describes how reconnecting with jazz, rhythm, and later his Latino heritage fundamentally shifted his relationship to writing music. Fun becomes not a distraction from rigor, but a necessary co...

Ania Vu discusses The Music She Writes , a project co-created with pianist Eunmi Ko to spotlight the work of Asian women composers. She talks about curation, community, and the power of making space for others — all while resisting narrow definitions of identity-based programming. micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday! Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you...

For Christopher Stark, what makes a residency valuable has little to do with geography. Across stints in Italy, Norway, and upstate New York, location left almost no mark on the work itself — the people did, offering a rare baseline of cross-disciplinary curiosity and genuine attention that felt validating in a way daily life rarely does. Residencies also provide distance: a chance to step outside...

Baljinder Sekhon talks about intuition, timbre, and the gap between the music we love and the music we create. He reflects on early experiences with sound, the influence of Mario Davidovsky, and why loving many kinds of music can actually make it harder to define a singular voice as a composer. micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday! Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Klin...

C. Jacqueline Wood reflects on art-making through the lens of loss, disillusionment, and resilience. Once embedded in the world of festivals and nonprofits, she has shifted toward creating on her own terms—outside the systems of grants, gatekeepers, and institutions. In this conversation, she speaks about why she no longer measures success by accolades, how her microcinema became a space for nurtu...

Phong Tran reflects on how disillusionment with the classical commissioning system led him to create a more autonomous performance practice. He shares candid thoughts on the institutional structures that shape musical labor, and how writing an essay for I Care If You Listen helped clarify his position. micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday! Listen to music/Maker with Ty...

Satisfaction is slippery. Tyler Kline and Marc Mellits trade notes on finishing a piece, cringing at what they’d change, and carrying those fixes into the next work. Mellits lays out his “three thirds” view—composer, performer, audience—arguing that interpretation by great players (and the listeners who complete the circuit) transforms notes on a page into art. Along the way they celebrate how per...

Chris Opperman remembers the day Final Fantasy music struck him like lightning. What began as a teenage obsession with Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtracks turned into a surreal journey—meeting his hero, joining the Distant Worlds team, and eventually orchestrating music for Final Fantasy concerts across the globe. From Carnegie Hall to Japan, Opperman shares how a lifelong fandom became a career bringing...

Beyza Yazgan reflects on how limited her early exposure to living composers was while studying piano in Turkey, where the focus remained firmly on the classical canon. That began to shift only after moving to New York, where encounters with contemporary music, free jazz, and improvisation classes quietly rewired her listening and sense of possibility. An improvisation course—initially peripheral t...

Anuj Bhutani reflects on what his non-linear path into composition may have actually been teaching him all along: a process built on following curiosity down paths that mostly don't pan out, until the one that does becomes obvious. A comment from Ted Hearn about watching him rework material over and over crystallized something Bhutani had been doing without fully naming it. A separate piece of adv...

Skydiving and Kurosawa might not seem like obvious musical influences — but for Emily Koh, both reshaped how she experiences time, perception, and meaning. She shares with Tyler Kline how the surreal suspension of a 40-second free fall, and the multi-perspective storytelling in Rashomon, deepened her thinking about how music is felt, heard, and understood. For Emily, the goal isn’t to control the...

Emma O’Halloran opens up about what drives her to make music—not from an external push to “say something,” but from an internal urge that feels inseparable from who she is. She reflects on creating music that channels emotion directly, sometimes bypassing traditional ideas of form or intellectual justification. Along the way, she unpacks her resistance to the “tortured artist” myth, the layered ho...

Sinclaire Marie frames artistic growth as something both practical and deeply personal: a balance between whether an object does what it’s meant to do and whether it communicates what the maker hopes to share. For her, success begins with function—whether a mug feels right in the hand or a teapot pours cleanly—but extends into conceptual clarity, where texture, weight, and surface convey warmth, c...

Austin Hammonds shares how a brief connection with composer Jay Flippen sparked the realization that a life in composition was actually possible — even from small-town Kentucky. He and Tyler reflect on what it meant to meet a living model of creative longevity, and how moments like that can shape an entire path forward. micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday! Listen to mu...

Composer and performer Hannah Boissonneault reflects on her early creative impulses—playing an out-of-tune family piano and inventing music long before she knew the rules. She talks with Tyler about how those childhood experiences laid the groundwork for a lifelong relationship with sound, one rooted in curiosity, freedom, and exploration. From classical piano to upright bass to electric ensembles...

Deadlines once drove Tyler Kline to crank out a new score every month—but three years spent perfecting a single piece reshaped his outlook. In this reflection he unpacks the shift from chasing constant output and external validation to finding satisfaction in slower, more deliberate work. The goal now: balance paid commissions with music made purely for the love of making it, and let the process i...

Andrew Noseworthy describes how his engagement with genres outside classical music—prog rock, ambient, hyperpop, and electronic scenes—has shaped his thinking less in sound than in structure, access, and dissemination. He points to the way these genres treat recordings as primary artistic objects rather than documentation, allowing albums to function as clear entry points, statements of identity,...

Ania Vu talks about her deep connection to musical storytelling — from interpreting the emotional structure of Beethoven to shaping her own sound world through color, timbre, and discovery. She shares how listening to composers like Joshua Hey and Katherine Balch helped expand her palette beyond pitch into something more nuanced and personal. micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday,...

Kurt Rohde traces his understanding of what a piece needs in order to exist: not a formal prompt, but a person, a story, an imagined life the music can grow out of. Writing Double Trouble for violist Ellen Ruth Rose was the first time all the linkages were in place — knowing the person, knowing what she'd done, knowing the piece was meant to be played by her — and the experience clarified somethin...