Kerry O'Brien

Kerry O’Brien is a musicologist and a percussionist, specializing in experimental music, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality. O’Brien has taught courses at Yale University and Indiana University, and she has recently presented her work at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Minimalist Music, the New Music Gathering, and the symposium After Experimental Music. With research supported by the Presser Foundation, the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Getty Research Library, and the American Association of University Women, her writings have appeared in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, NewMusicBox, the Chicago Reader, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, and the forthcoming edited collection Rethinking Reich.

As a percussionist, O’Brien is co-founder of the contemporary music organization Nief-Norf, which holds an annual summer festival each June. Since its inception in 2011, the Nief-Norf Summer Festival has offered a two-week immersive gathering for composers, performers, and scholars of experimental music. By fusing performance, composition, and research, the festival encourages hybridized modes of engaging with music––as scholar/composers, performer/scholars, composer/performers––a hybridized approach O’Brien aims to cultivate herself as a musicologist and percussionist at Cornish.