"Orchestra Online" with guest Laura Karpman, composer
5:00 - 5:50pm
American composer Laura Karpman is the featured speaker this week for Professor Paul Phillips's Fall 2020 class on orchestral music, "Orchestra Online," viewable on Zoom. | RSVP required for non-Stanford attendees.
A bold, incandescent talent, composer Laura Karpman creates powerful, imaginative scores that push the boundaries of storytelling. Her award-winning music, spanning film, television, theater, interactive media and live performance, reflects an audaciously creative, prodigious, fresh spirit. Karpman collaborates with the most creative filmmakers of our time: Misha Green, Steven Spielberg, Alex Gibney, Kasi Lemmons, Rory Kennedy, Sam Pollard, Laura Nix, and Eleanor, Francis Ford, and Sophia Coppola. The five-time Emmy winner’s scores include the HBO hit series Lovecraft Country and the Discovery channel's documentary series Why We Hate. Her animated work includes Netflix's Sitara. Her scores for interactive media include Guardians of Middle Earth, Everquest 2, Kung Fu Panda 2, Project Spark, Kinect Disneyland Adventures, and Untold Legends Dark Kingdom.
Across concert halls, Karpman is well known for her Grammy award-winning album, Ask Your Mama, a multimedia opera based on poems by Langston Hughes. For this Carnegie Hall commission, Karpman collaborated with The Roots, soprano Jessye Norman, performer De’Adre Aziza, and jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon.
After founding the Alliance for Women Film Composers, Karpman became the first American woman composer inducted in the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, and was subsequently elected to be the first female governor of the music branch. There, Karpman advocated for Academy membership for dozens of underrepresented composers and songwriters, as well as spearheading the Academy Women’s Initiative.
Karpman is an advisor for the Sundance Film Institute and on the faculty of the USC Film Scoring Program and the San Francisco Conservatory. She received a doctorate from The Juilliard School, where she studied with 20th-century icon Milton Babbitt.