OF HOUSE AND HOME

On the morning of July 1, I threw a bunch of clothes, books, and electronics into some luggage and drove with my husband to Louisville from Cincinnati. Despite months of planning music and community projects, I didn’t feel at all prepared for the physical, material beginning of this residency. 

The past year flew by for me at breakneck speed, packed with deadlines, performances, and travel. In late June, I even made a quick trip to New York City to hear my husband, Tyler Kline (who is also a composer!), have an American Composers Orchestra reading in a cohort with Seare Farhat, my fellow member of the 2026–2027 Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, right before our big moves to Louisville!

As someone who loves being prepared, I felt exactly the opposite for this move.

I had very romantic ideas about the way I wanted the transition to go. In my head, I had planned the perfect going away party where every single one of our Cincinnati friends would come! We’d finish our bucket list of restaurants we had wanted to try and do hometown tourist-y things we never got to do! We’d finally tackle everything on our house to-do list before planning to sell! 

Of course… none of that happened.

Most of all, I felt like I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye with the house I had called home for the past six years. This was our first home and in this time we’d lived so much life here. Between the two of us, we’d written hours of music — thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of notes — within these walls. This is the place where I took up ceramics as a second artistic practice and where Tyler started his radio show and podcast in a basement studio he built with his own hands. Where I relentlessly tended the soil so I could have a pollinator garden. Where we brought home our first cat, Tofu. Where we said goodbye to our first dog, Peggie. Where we even got married in the backyard.

It’s not so much that I would miss the house (in fact, we had truly outgrown it), but that it was a physical monument to so many core memories and life experiences. If I didn’t have this daily reminder, would they eventually fade into the background?

In that regard, July was a very liminal month for me. Tyler stayed in Cincinnati to continue preparing our house to sell while I immediately dived into my LOCC duties, and I returned on the weekends to help move things along. Each time, it looked less and less like our home as art, books, blankets, etc. went into nondescript cardboard boxes and on each drive, I felt myself gradually shifting from thinking of making the trip as “driving home” to “driving to Cincinnati.” 

Instead of one grandiose moment of severance, the process of untethering from one home and putting down roots in the next turned out to be infinitely more gradual and subtle than I imagined it would be.

As you can guess, I’ve been deeply reflecting on what “home” actually means for me. Sure, having a place to call your own is one version – a privilege I absolutely do not take for granted – but there is another version of home that, to me, is more ephemeral and perhaps even more fulfilling. This version is intrinsically tied to place-making: to community, belonging, and purpose.

My mind keeps returning to the Japanese concept of ikigai (生き甲斐), which loosely translates to reason for being. The idea that a fulfilling life can emerge from the intersection of what we love, what we are capable of doing, and what we can contribute to the world feels particularly relevant to this moment in my life.

My approach to this LOCC year has always been to find that Venn diagram of who I am at my artistic core with how I can best serve the Louisville Orchestra and larger community.

At its most fundamental, my desire to make music (and even ceramics) is driven by curiosity: a fascination with sound, color, texture, the natural world, the way seemingly disparate things can interact to create something unexpected, and so much more. I’m a composer first, but since having added ceramics as a second practice I find myself continually blurring the boundaries between these two practices: making ceramic musical instruments, but also blurring the lines between composer and maker.

One idea that has followed me across these different practices is terroir; this word is most often associated with food and wine, but more broadly refers to the way a particular place — the soil, climate, landscape, culture, and history — influences what is produced there. It’s what makes a particular wine taste like stone fruit, but also what makes Red River Gorge, well… kind of red. 

I grew up as the quintessential Chinese Restaurant Kid running around my mom’s restaurants, so food has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Long before I thought of myself as someone concerned with “place” or “community,” I was given a masterclass in the ways that food connects people to where they come from, where they live, and each other. This eventually set me up for many survival jobs in food service, giving me a different vantage point as an adult in the rhythms of hospitality and the very real work of creating a space where people can gather. 

Eventually, that idea of terroir found its way into my musical life, too. I remember sitting in a wine class at a restaurant/hotel I worked at (when I thought I was going to be a sommelier — perhaps more on that at a later time), and the wine director stating that he became obsessed with wine because it allowed him a way to make sense of the world. 

Music, I realized, had always been that for me. 

I began to wonder whether music could do something similar: could the circumstances surrounding a piece — the people, the place, the culture, the environment — become part of the music itself?

So in 2017, with the help of my now-husband Tyler, I founded Terroir New Music in Tampa, FL as an avenue for collaboration between music and food/beverage, but more broadly as an exploration of the ways that music can be shaped by its surroundings: by the people who make it, the places where it happens, and the communities that give it meaning. (By the way, we’d love to continue Terroir New Music here in Louisville, so if you’d like to collaborate please reach out!)

Now, almost a decade later, combining music and clay has become another way for me to explore the same idea. There is something so kismet about exploring terroir through ceramics in Kentucky, a state so wonderfully rich in clay soil. By nature, using clay is choosing an artistic medium that is literally made of earth. As I’ve begun making clay instruments, I am not only interested in what sounds I might be able to make, but also honoring the entire chain of relationships that bring that sound into being: earth, place, maker, community, and eventually the sound itself. 

This is a big part of what drew me to the Creators Corps: the opportunity to make work that could exist both within the traditional composer model and outside of it, in new terrain—on the spectrum of composer–maker—and with the privilege of spending an entire year embedded in an artistic community rather than simply passing through it. In addition to working with the world-class Louisville Orchestra, I will also get to work with so many local organizations that are doing good and important work and spend time with the communities that the LO and these organizations serve.

Perhaps another reason why this residency feels so exciting for me is because Kentucky is not new territory. My husband Tyler was born and raised in Kentucky, and in 2019 we moved back to his hometown of Mt. Sterling, even experiencing the beginning of the pandemic here. My brand new orchestra piece, Together, that you’ll hear on September’s In Harmony Tour, is inspired by that moment in time.

In that way, I’m not arriving in Kentucky with a blank slate, and yet neither am I simply returning to the life we had here before. I get to return to the Bluegrass State with a new lens: more life and artistic experience, and a deep reverence for what it means to belong to a place — particularly this place.

That last part is essential to me. I’m interested in creating music and art that invites people to participate or feel a sense of ownership in, rather than asking them to simply experience a finished product. I’m excited to be leading community projects where anyone can investigate this spectrum of making, composing, and even performing for themselves through ceramic instrument making.

I’ve planned several flexible formats that will allow for a broad range of ages, skill levels, and even accessibility points. Through the In Harmony Tour and the convenience of air-dry clay, we’ll even be able to take these workshops to rural areas of Kentucky.

Now when I think of home, I think of Louisville as being the place, and being part of LOCC as the place-making. Together, being here gives me the unique opportunity to spend an entire year writing, planning, making, listening, experimenting, meeting new people, and probably so much more that I might never have gotten to do otherwise.

Perhaps that’s the scariest and yet most exciting part: all of the things I didn’t plan for! 

I’m looking forward to the music I haven’t written yet, the people I haven’t met yet, the communities I haven’t visited yet, and the life-changing ideas that will probably come from places I’m not currently looking. I’m looking forward to seeing how my work changes when it is surrounded by a new landscape and a new community. I’m looking forward to making music, objects, and experiences with other people, and hopefully making something that none of us could have made alone.

Maybe that’s part of what it means to make a home, too: not to replicate the way the last one was, or to arrive with a prescribed version of what you think it should be, but to live and work in tandem with a new place, new people, and new ideas.

Already, this feels like home.