25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Heather Stebbins is making music from sounds inside her home and her head
Music is made of memory — sounds heard, feelings felt, lessons learned, all funneled through the intentionality of the moment. If you need a reminder of this fundamental truth, the music of Heather Stebbins can make it feel as vivid as life.
Rich in timbre and exploratory in form, her latest compositions somehow involve just three main memory layers: the synthesizers Stebbins began studying in college (she teaches students at George Washington University how to use them today); the cello she took up in childhood, then abandoned in adulthood, then retrieved in recent years; and various field recordings of her everyday life — a practice Stebbins traces back to the private plot of real estate inside Maryland's Patapsco Valley State Park where she grew up paying sharp attention to the sound of the birds and the breeze. 'My formal musical training started when I was 6. I started cello lessons,' Stebbins says, 'but prior to that, I was just so absorbed in the sound of my natural environment. … Now, I'm like a hoarder of sound, always recording stuff.'
