Friday, May 8, 2026 at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music
EVENT TIMELINE
3 PM – 5 PM: Community Gallery in the Music Library Classroom
4 PM – 5 PM: Wildfire Voices Roundtable in Lani Hall
5:30 PM – 7:15 PM: Firebirth Community Concert in Lani Hall
7 PM – 9PM: Community Reception in the Music Library
Learn more about our exhibitors, speakers, and performers:
This event is made possible by our generous presenting partners, the UCLA Walter H. Rubsamen Music Library, Davise Fund; the Center for Musical Humanities at UCLA; and the Society for American Music (SAM) as part of their Sounding the Nation at 250 initiative.
We would also like to thank San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity and Fender Guitars for graciously allowing us to showcase their custom Stratocaster.
COMMUNITY GALLERY
Explore interactive works created in response to the impact of wildfires in Los Angeles. Open throughout the event day, we invite the community to join this space of conversation and individual reflection.
Custom Fender Stratocaster
Crafted for San Gabriel Valley Habitat for Humanity from trees that were damaged around the Eaton Fire, this is one of four one-of-a-kind instruments that will be auctioned off to raise funds for recovery efforts.
Ian Wellman: A Particularly Dangerous Situation
Album, 37 minutes, 2025
This 10-track album is a meditative, at times harrowing, interpretive document of the catastrophic California wildfires of 2025.
Los Angeles Field Recording Club Project
Sound collage, 2026
The city itself is a collaborator. Streets, homes, canyons, and shorelines speak through their acoustics. This project listens to Los Angeles as a living system in transition.
Ashley Te: “Coyote”
Video, 2 minutes 56 seconds, 2025
This video piece is an ode to her relationship with the wild coyotes in her neighborhood in Los Angeles. Coyote documents ecological grief and the desire to tend to a new environmental spatial imaginary.
Ashley Te is a third-year undergraduate student at UCLA double majoring in Art and Ecology, Behavior & Evolution. Her work focuses on urban and natural ecologies and how they intersect.
Contact info: ashleyte@g.ucla.edu or @kaaliate on Instagram
Lucy Rickart-Webb: “Train to the Palisades”
Electroacoustic piece, 1 minute 16 seconds, 2025
Inspired by the clicking of LAFD and Cal Fire radio traffic, this piece layers in sounds captured in their voice memos and reflects the stress and uncertainty of the 2025 Palisades Fire.
Matt Smith: “As Brightness is to Time”
Video recording of performance, 8 minutes 56 seconds, 2025
As Brightness Is To Time did not begin as a response to the Los Angeles fires, but it became one. The piece underwent a fundamental transformation, and what emerged ultimately affirms the possibility that care, presence, and listening can still generate something vital, even in the aftermath of devastation.
Kate Lain: smoke and ash loops
16mm film finished digitally, 2020
smoke and ash loops is a changing arrangement of looped short film strips that are physical records of the Bobcat Fire of September 2020 that burned over 100,000 acres in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. The loops feature camera-less images made using clear 16mm film leader, cyanotype chemicals, and glue. The cyanotype strips were made with the smoke that filled the air, ash that fell at Lain’s apartment, whatever sunlight made it through the thick smoke, and tap water. The non-photographic strips were made by placing glue-covered film strips outside in smoky conditions to catch falling ash and other material falling from the air. The film strips have been digitized.
Kate Lain is a Pasadena-based interdisciplinary artist. In much of her work, she creates oblique portraits of everyday spaces, phenomena, and people, using abstraction as a way to invite critical engagement. Her practice is rooted in observation and documentation, particularly of so-called “natural” landscapes in the Los Angeles area. She approaches many of her projects as collaborations with places, material properties, natural and chemical processes, and elements of chance that arise from all of these.
Gabriel Mulder: “Palisades Fire”
Audio recording, 2026
Mulder’s residence burned fully due to the Palisades Fire, including his Steinway grand piano, car, and clothes. The aim of this composition was to capture that experience. It features a Main Theme (pre-fire), the fire itself, the aftermath, and the main theme coming back (life continuing on) but in a different way. Recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and released earlier this year.
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WILDFIRE VOICES ROUNDTABLE
Chris Douridas is among the premier musical tastemakers in the world. He began his career as music director and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic, at the flagship Los Angeles NPR station, KCRW-FM, one of the most respected and progressive radio stations in the world. At KCRW, he is known for his creation and curation of KCRW’s all-music channel Eclectic24, and his intimate and candid conversations with the most iconic artists of our time, including Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, John Legend, Quincy Jones, David Bowie, Madonna, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, and Tom Waits among many others. Beyond radio, Douridas has been a regular fixture in the media and entertainment industries, serving as a creative exec under Mo Ostin, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Dreamworks, working on the PBS series Sessions at West 54th, working closely with Steve Jobs as Creative Programming Consultant for the first four years of iTunes, and hosting and producing exclusive programming with Elton John and Justin Timberlake at Amazon. Douridas may be best known as a 3-time Grammy-nominated music supervisor for both American Beauty and the Shrek series. Douridas continues to champion the best new artists from around the world through his ongoing work at KCRW and through his long-running live music concert series School Night.
Liz Koslov is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Environment and Sustainability, and Sociology at UCLA. Her research brings an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach to analyzing the politics of urban climate change adaptation, particularly debates over how to respond to sea-level rise, flooding, and wildfire. At UCLA she teaches on climate change through the lens of the built environment, the social life of sea-level rise, and environmental and climate justice.
Much of Dr. Koslov’s work critically examines the idea and process of “managed retreat” from high-risk areas. She is writing a book, Retreat: Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate-Changed City, that follows homeowners in Staten Island, New York, who organized to seek buyouts after Hurricane Sandy that would permanently demolish portions of their neighborhoods. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she leads a collaborative project on the intersection of managed retreat and wildfire (see also this New York Times guest essay). Additional interests include the shifting meanings of urban natures, the politics of risk mapping, and media and climate change.
Before coming to UCLA, Dr. Koslov was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. She received a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, where she was affiliated with the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Superstorm Research Lab, a mutual-aid research collective studying climate change, disaster, inequality, and urban politics. She holds an MSc in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literatures from the George Washington University.
Jessica A. Schwartz approaches research on musical representations and sonic histories of militarization and imperial violence through community-focused collaborations, movements, and creative dissent. Schwartz is the author of Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences(Duke University Press, 2021) and articles in American Quarterly, Music & Politics, Women & Music, the Journal of American Music, Punk & Post-Punk, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, Amerasia, Shima, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music, among others, which showcase her work on American studies, Pacific studies, environmental anthropology, and Indigenous studies. As a disability scholar, Schwartz interrogates institutional, intersectional ableism and workshops radical accessibility in and beyond the classroom in courses such as “DIY: Punk Organizing as Social Justice” and “Unsettling Pedagogies: Music & Education.” Schwartz’s hosts the Punkast Series (podcast), is the cofounder/Academic Advisor of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, an Arkansas-based non-profit, and plays in noise/punk bands.
Kim Yu is a senior safety engineer and is the Fire Safety Specialist for Caltech. She is also currently serving as a councilmember for her city of Altadena. Prior to that, Kim spent over 16.5 years with the Pasadena Fire Department as a Hazardous Materials Specialist where she served as a first responder and Deputy Health Officer for all Haz Mat incidents, enforced laws and regulations to protect the public from fire, environmental and chemical hazards, and lead the Haz Mat team in the Counterterrorism Unit with the Pasadena Police Department. During this time, she was also appointed to the State Fire Marshal’s Special Effect Advisory Committee where she served for 3 years before leaving the fire service. In her role with the Pasadena Fire Department, she has extensive experience working with both the LA County Fire Department, and the LA County Sheriff’s Department and even worked for the LA County Department of Public Works for 2 years in their Environmental Programs Division. She graduated with a degree from UCLA in Biochemistry (minor in Music History) and obtained a master’s in public health from the USC Keck School of Medicine with an emphasis on global health leadership.
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FIREBIRTH COMMUNITY CONCERT
Madeline Barrett, “Leaves” (2025)
- Molly Hennig, soprano
- Will Rand, piano
Leaves opens with fragility and intimacy, tracing the quiet shock of loss. As the text turns toward stars, earth, and renewal, the audience is invited to sing the recurring chorus, embodying the shift from isolation to shared breath. In this way, the work becomes not only a performance but an act of collective healing.
Responding to the ecological and cultural landscape of Los Angeles, Leaves reflects on the paradox of fire: destruction and renewal intertwined. Through sound, memory, and shared voice, Leaves offers space to grieve what has fallen while imagining what might grow in its place.
About the composer— I am a composer of concert music whose work is inspired by nature, poetry, and the many ways human beings stay connected to one another. In recent years, my work has also been shaped by my love of pop and folk music, as well as by close collaboration with performers throughout the creative process. I am especially drawn to writing pieces that feel immediate and honest, whether for chamber ensembles, orchestra, or voices.
Maya Yie, “Blaze” (2025)
- Johannes Eberhart, conductor
- Amanda Tiffany Lee, flute
- Isabelle Krieger, clarinet
- Em Ellis, French horn
- Lucas O’Brien, trombone
- Ellie Loya, violin
- Isaac Fromme, cello
- Isaac Tin-Long Chan, viola
- Alessio Santolini Raggi, piano
Blaze (2025) was written in remembrance of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires and the impact they have had on the surrounding community. I sought to employ music’s ability to create shared emotional experiences and bring people together as a community. The piece recounts the uncertainty, fear, and inner turmoil at the onset of the fires and the shock of the unexpected rapid progression afterwards.
About the composer — I am a sophomore studying Computer Science and Biology at the California Institute of Technology, and I have always been passionate about music as a violinist, vocalist, and composer. In my compositions, I aim to convey emotion and imagery, using music to tell stories and explore joy, fear, determination, hopelessness, and other aspects of the human experience. I often draw on specific images, such as bird calls, storms, or robots dancing, to shape these emotional narratives. I am particularly interested in understanding each instrument’s unique timbre and conceptual associations, as well as how their sounds interact and fit together within an ensemble.
Molly Hennig, “Look at Me” (2026)
- Molly Hennig, soprano
- Will Rand, piano
“Look at Me” is an original art song that sets a text Hennig wrote in contemplation of her possible evacuation from UCLA during the fires of January 2025.
About the composer — Molly Hennig (she/her) is a third-year doctoral student of the Department of Musicology at UCLA, as well as a vocalist and composer specializing in modes of listening, gathering, and play. For the 2021 Source Song Festival Molly worked as an MN Song Composer under the mentorship of Libby Larsen and David Evan Thomas and set to music Minnesota Poet Laureate and poet-in-residence Joyce Sutphen’s poem “The Cup” (2021). In March 2022, Molly’s setting of Sara Teasdale’s “Let it Be Forgotten” (2021) received third place at the Spark’s & Wiry Cries and Source Song Festival’s Minnesota Song Slam. Molly later worked with Lori Laitman as part of the 2021-2022 National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Mentoring Program for Composers. Her setting of Teasdale’s poetry, titled “Sister of the Sky” (2022) premiered as part of the Let it be New concert commissioned by the NATS Composer Mentorship Program and the Cincinnati Song Initiative. As a vocalist, Molly’s repertoire consists of contemporary English, Yiddish and Irish-language art song, musical theater, and experimental music. Her current research interests as a musicology student involve humor as musical discourse, particularly concerning sound studies in online livestreaming, neurodivergence in gaming and play, and narratives of childhood entertainment.
Edward Nesbit and Thomas Hodgson, “What Would the World Be?” from the Fire and Water song cycle (2026)
- Allie Kelly, soprano
- Thomas Hodgson, voice
As part of the Chancellor’s Arts Initiative, Thomas Hodgson and Edward Nesbit’s project Altadena After the Fire: Reimagining Place Through Music and Poetry is a new song cycle set to verses of local and established poets. The cycle reflects on themes of climate change, habitat destruction, and human loss and renewal. This unaccompanied vocal piece includes a preview of the first song in the cycle.
Ian Wellman “Intro” and title track from Particularly Dangerous Situation (2025) + Kate Lain smoke and ash loops (2020)
- Ian Wellman, recording
- Kate Lain, visual art
- Morgan Bates, trumpet
Ian Wellman’s album “Particularly Dangerous Situation”, is a meditative, at times harrowing, interpretive document of the catastrophic California wildfires of 2025. Wellman’s stunningly descriptive field recordings plus his signature tape loop textures and sampled drones combine for a dramatic ten-part narrative that is both frightening and sorrowful in its depiction of calamitous events.
Kate Lain’s smoke and ash loops is a changing arrangement of a set of looped short film strips that are physical records of the Bobcat Fire of September 2020 that burned over 100,000 acres in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles.
This performance brings together the two opening tracks of Wellman’s albums, Kate Lain’s film-based art, and a musical response by Morgan Bates, a PhD candidate in musicology and accomplished trumpeter.
——Intermission——
Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Ensemble, original compositions (2026)
- Nicolaus Gelin, trumpet
- Nathan Gilbreath, trombone
- Mwanzi Harriott, guitar
- Yerin Kim, bass
- Elisee Ngbo, piano
- Mailo Rakotonanahary, drums
About the ensemble—The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA is a tuition-free two-year program that accepts one ensemble of musicians for each class. All of the students receive full scholarships, as well as stipends to cover their monthly living expenses. The students study both individually and as a small group, receiving personal mentoring, ensemble coaching, and lectures on the jazz tradition. They are also encouraged to experiment in expanding jazz in new directions through their compositions and performances.
Will Rand, “Firebirth” (2025)
I. lost succession: a tended flame
II. broken succession: excluded flame
III. consequent succession: rampant flame
IV. early succession: fireweed, revival
- Grace M. Alexander, violin
- Will Rand, piano
“Firebirth” is a part of a commission project entitled “Resilience Sounds” intended to explore the relationship between music, the natural world, and communities within it. It unfolds as a series of sketches on the nature of wildfires and their relationship with ecological wellness. Each movement invokes different ecological cycles of fire and the ways they have been interrupted by fire exclusion practices implemented in an era of colonialism. Ultimately, life always finds a way back.
About the composer — As the founder of EarthStory, a project that convenes community in the pursuit of ecological wholeness, Will Rand draws together creatives, storytellers, and community members to remember their stories of belonging as a part of the biotic community. Will is a collaborative pianist, composer, and conductor and has shared music in many different communities around the United States. He is the next the Music Director of the Seattle Peace Chorus. He has served local churches as a Minister of Worship Arts in Seattle, Washington, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Toledo, Ohio.
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