Walking down the halls of the Cal Poly music department, you’re met with a kind of structured cacophony. Passing by the practice rooms gives the effect of flipping through radio stations in rapid succession — behind one door you might hear a jazzy trumpet solo; behind another you might hear a violinist hammering out scales. At the end of the hallway I am invited into the office of Dr. Julie Herndon, who is an assistant professor of Music Technology and Composition at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. While we talk we can occasionally hear an operatic aria through the walls as a student takes a singing lesson in a neighboring office.
Herndon has spent the spring quarter guiding her students through preparations for their end-of-year showcase concert on May 29 and 30, where they’ll present original compositions at the Performing Arts Center (PAC) Pavilion — an event that will highlight the creative work they've developed over the quarter.
When she’s not teaching, Herndon is a composer, performer, and sound artist, with advanced degrees in music composition from Stanford University and Mills College. Her undergraduate education was in piano performance — rather than composition — but she learned over the course of her study that her real passion lay in creating original work rather than solely interpreting the work of others.
Music composition is an intensely personal process — so much so that even its definition shifts from artist to artist. For Herndon, the most fitting description comes from 20th-century composer Edgar Varèse, who famously defined composition as “organized sound.” Herndon explores a subset of the field with her writing on embodied composition, which she defines as “the practice of organizing sound in relation to the body and its internal/external experiences.” She says there are three main hallmarks of the style: “There’s voice, gesture, and the creative state. Those three things are kind of the tenets of embodied composition,” she said.
Herndon brings all of these principles to life in her own compositions. Voice is prominent in her 2018 composition “to Speak,” which asks players to remember an early instance of speaking and uses the resulting speech as the rhythmic backbone of the piece. Herndon uses gesture in her work “Together,” a 2023 piece that uses custom-built electronic instruments called Connecting Gloves that create sounds when players touch hands. And in Herndon’s 2023 composition “When the Machine Rhymes With My Body,” she asks players to tune into a creative state by playing in time to the tempo of their own heartbeats and breath.
Herndon also incorporates the sounds of the natural world into her compositions. One of her most recent pieces, “DIRT,” weaves together field recordings of crickets, oysters, and the microscopic agents at work in compost to create an intimate window into an ever-changing underground world.
With technology, performance techniques, and field recordings affording so many avenues for creative expression through composition, Herndon faces a unique pedagogical challenge: how does one “teach” creativity?
In her classes at Cal Poly, Herndon’s educational focus is on giving students the tools that allow them to create what they want to create. The “Music Technology and Composition” series has three progressively more advanced courses. Herndon said she starts with “laying the foundation of how to use digital tools” by introducing the students to digital audio workstations in the department’s Davidson Music Center. Incrementally, Herndon introduces best practices for recording, posing questions to her students: “What kind of mic should you use for a snare drum? What kind of mic should you use for a guitar? What kind of mic should you use for a voice?” Students learn about synthesizers, sound mixing — even specialized microphones that record through solid material rather than air or that translate electromagnetic impulses into sound.
As the students slip more and more tools into their compositional tool belts, Herndon ultimately leaves most assignments flexible to each budding composer’s creative inclinations, saying, “Some people will write their own songs. Some people will record a cover of a song they really like. But the material is all their own.”
This flexibility reaches its height in the spring semester. “...[I]t’s really the most open class of all,” Herndon said about the curriculum for the most advanced course in the series. “For this, we’re creating a show called ‘Soundings,’ which is a multimedia concert where each student writes their own piece, whether in a collaborative group or solo,” Herndon said.
After students develop their showcase pieces, they spend the second half of the advanced course working on the practical aspects of putting together a performance: production, marketing, stage diagrams, lighting, and cues. “Students don’t only write the music for the show, they produce the whole entire show,” said Herndon. “It’s an opportunity for students to go over to the PAC… and learn industry standards for producing a concert.” When students go on to perform professionally after graduation, Herndon said, “...they know exactly what they need and they know what’s going on behind the scenes to make that happen.”
Herndon decided on the name “Soundings” to encourage her student composers and their audience members to reconsider the distinction we often make between music and everyday, ordinary sound, saying, “Something I try to really emphasize in my classes is that sound and music can really be the same thing. When you're walking down the street and you hear your feet rhythmically hitting the sidewalk,” she said, “that is just as musical as somebody sitting at a snare drum and playing something rhythmic.”
Herdon shows me the music production room in the Davidson Music Center, where students in all three composition classes use computer workstations equipped with keyboards, microphones, and music production software. This is where students brainstorm, collaborate, and compose original pieces — including the pieces that will be performed at “Soundings.”
A week later, I sat in on a rehearsal for the upcoming showcase. By that point, the students’ pieces were finished, so they dedicated much of the rehearsal to practicing the transitions that guide one composition to the next. As a viewer, this seems to be no easy task — the students' compositions, reflections of their individual creative voices, vary widely in genre, tempo, and mood. During the rehearsal two recurring motifs emerged: illustrations of this year’s chosen theme, ‘Music in Color,’ and the incorporation of natural sounds — from snippets of crickets chirping to birdsong. It seemed that some students had already embraced Herndon’s conviction that everyday sound can be music, too.
Student Francis Truong is one of the composers who chose to use sounds from the natural world in his piece. Truong took inspiration from a romantic composer, Amy Beach, who transformed bird calls into music. “We did the same thing,” Truong said of his piece, “...it tells a story of this bird and its love life with another bird, with the violin playing one part and then voice and trombone playing another part.”
Truong said a personal highlight of the show will be getting to run lights — a benefit of the production element of the course and of the multimedia nature of “Soundings.”
The showcase will feature ensemble-in-residence Longleash and original choreography from students in the dance department in addition to the composition students’ original work.
Herndon welcomes the interdisciplinary nature of “Soundings,” and values the freedom it gives her students to create what she called their “bucket list” pieces. “...when we’re at the PAC, we have all these resources — with the dance, and the video projectors, and the lights, and the stage — and there’s just such a huge opportunity to do whatever it is you’re envisioning,” Herndon said.
As students in the program learn to compose music and bring their work to life through production, they are able to exercise their creativity while gaining practical and professional skills — and they come away from the experience with a new understanding of the music found in everyday life.
“Soundings: Music in Color” will take place May 29 and 30 on the Cal Poly campus at the PAC Pavilion at 7:30 p.m.
This reporting is made possible by a grant from the Shanbrom Family Foundation.