Kitty Xiao

No space is static. The earth turns steadily. Outdoors, weather and climate are constantly in motion, and indoors even the smallest shift in temperature, light, or human presence produces micro-changes in the molecular structure of walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture. Socially and politically, too, the world remains in flux—sometimes faster than many would prefer. Throughout our lives, we interact with a world that never stays the same for even a single second. It is precisely this perpetual state of change that fascinates Kitty Xiao.

After growing up and studying piano in Melbourne, Kitty Xiao grappled with the rigid conventions of classical music. She began composing by performing her own works on the piano—often singing and playing simultaneously. Her interest in electronics also emerged early, shaped by her experience in bands and by her first composition teacher, Anthony Lyons, who introduced her to the Buchla Easel synthesizer. In 2018, she moved to the United States to pursue composition studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where mentorship from Oliver Schneller, encounters with instrument builders, and immersion in Rochester’s noise-music scene became formative influences on her artistic development. She later continued her studies as a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York.

Her 2021 piece In flesh, written for cellist Hamish Jamieson, places the solo performer in an electronic sound environment that feels both alien and eerily familiar. This effect is intentional: the stereo track is built entirely from short samples of Jamieson’s own cello playing, recorded with Xiao and then edited and reassembled to varying degrees. The cellist must now explore, orient himself within, and respond to this hybrid world. Xiao gives him considerable freedom: the piece has no strict meter, and many sounds—such as “marcato distorted crunch up bow,” “white noise effect,” and “sul ponticello overtones”—are notated graphically. The performer is left to navigate the sonic landscape on his own terms. How does one explore a space—physically, musically? What rules can a composer set, and what rules does the space itself impose? At first, the cello approaches the artificial sound world tentatively. At times it seems to pose questions, waiting for a response through scratchy, broken harmonics. Yet the realm of mutated samples has its own climate, its own meteorology—grains of cello sound swirl through the air; it feels at once dry and humid. The space expands; its timbres seep into the cello, smear across it, and provoke increasingly agitated gestures from Jamieson. The view becomes hazy: particles of warped wood seem to drift everywhere, as if col legno strikes and fingerboard scraping had turned into airborne matter. In flesh shows, in a simple yet intricate way, how the electronic space and the solo instrument are literally cut from the same wood, sharing the same materiality while remaining distinct entities. They begin to merge, yet never fully become one.

In 2022, Ensemble Modern premiered a sequel: In flesh ii. Here the title becomes even more literal—Xiao describes it as a piece about the body, “the spacious singing of its flesh, its imaginary,” and its relationship to language, especially in its “sticky, thick and guttural” moments. She found inspiration in the Chinese-American poet Jenny Zhang. Once again, there is a soloist: soprano Nina Guo, paired with an ensemble as powerful as the electronic layer in the first In flesh, although no electronics are employed. Guo is granted a degree of freedom in navigating her relationship with the ensemble—freedom she continually recalibrates, reinforcing it in improvised passages.

Guo’s vocal techniques—guttural sounds, “air inhalation attacks,” and other extended gestures—bring the physiology of the human voice into almost tactile focus. The “text” consists mainly of vowels and diphthongs, giving her room to explore the connection between voice, body, breath, and saliva. Through amplification, these intimate sounds are lifted into perceptible range, allowing them to coexist with the ensemble’s weight and density. The focus is not on emotion or affect but on cells, muscles, and bodily fluids—yet the work reminds us that emotion originates in the body, shaped by its chemistry and hormones, and manifests through it.

The ensemble part again suggests a landscape, this time volcanic: a physical weight that far exceeds that of the human body. Yet Guo at times seems to become part of this landscape, as though the ensemble were her body and she were calling outward from within it. Even in the granular and pointillistic timbres, an unexpected “cross pollination” emerges between instruments and voice—between interior and exterior. Here, boundaries appear along the contrast between transients and delay. Xiao treats the attack of a sound as texture, while delay becomes resonance, space, temperature, and atmosphere.

In pour, premiered by the Mivos Quartet in April 2023, Xiao extends two ideas from the In flesh cycle: the relationships between disparate sonic worlds, and the conception of sound as something material and tactile. The latter is emphasized through the vocabulary of the score: sections of pour bear titles such as “viscous,” “thick,” “murky,” “overflowing,” and “opaque”—qualities associated with organic matter. The electronic part is labeled with descriptors like “screech” and “irregular liquid-like.” Here it interacts with four equal string players—there is no soloist—through a relationship shaped by differing rhythms, occasional disruptions, and moments of convergence. pour begins with microtonal layers in the strings, interlocking through gentle glissandi. Sharp accents trace a slow upward motion, though in a zigzag. From a fissure in these layers rises an electronic vapour that thickens, expands, and gradually takes on a liquid, even sticky, character. More than the In flesh works, pour thrives on meticulously sculpted sound spaces that dilate and contract, resembling no real-world environment yet acquiring an almost hyper-real presence. The string players seem somewhat dehumanized, de-individualized—moving like a swarm whose collective intelligence determines the musical direction, as though they naturally belong to this environment.

The piece is slippery and sticky; it boils and simmers. When trying to describe its sonic impressions, vocabulary drawn from organic processes comes readily to mind. It is music that aligns with what philosopher Christoph Cox calls Sonic Materialism—music understood not primarily as mathematical abstraction or a formal play of symbols and syntax, but as something fundamentally material. Sonic Materialism here means thinking of music in terms of processes, events, forces, and intensities. Humans no longer stand hierarchically above material (or rather, matter), but enter into an equal relationship with it—a relationship that includes the audience and their perceptive bodies.

This becomes especially tangible in tendons for transformation for cello, percussion, piano, electronics, and video (2023). Here, sonic materials enter into direct physical contact and exchange. Transducers attached to the piano, cymbal, and bass drum transmit sounds—reptile noises and live cello among them—into the surfaces of the instruments, merging with their timbral spectra. New sonic alloys emerge, combining the properties of different materials in inseparable ways. The performers move the transducers freely across their instruments, shaping the resulting mixtures in real time. Their semi-improvised performance is guided by a video score that resembles organic material under a microscope. Xiao conceives the piece as a “sensory environment” in which performers “can navigate and interpret to their sense of touch, sound, visual information – pointing out moments within the environment the performer can choose to react to.” What appears throughout Xiao’s work is realized most fully here: the performers are invited to translate their own perceptions and associations into the constantly shifting live sonic environment, expanding and reinventing it through their playing.

The performers move the transducers freely across their instruments, shaping the resulting mixtures in real time. Their semi-improvised performance is guided by a video score that resembles organic material under a microscope. Xiao conceives the piece as a “sensory environment” in which performers “can navigate and interpret to their sense of touch, sound, visual information – pointing out moments within the environment the performer can choose to react to.” What appears throughout Xiao’s work is realized most fully here: the performers are invited to translate their own perceptions and associations into the constantly shifting live sonic environment, expanding and reinventing it through their playing.

If music is understood as a fluid construct of different sonic materialities through which one can navigate—physically, gesturally, perceptually—can one ever fully master it? Can one perfect one’s orientation within it, or will one always remain a seeker? Are moments of complete command even desirable? Perhaps a few more pieces by Kitty Xiao will offer insight. And even then, any answer will only ever be part of an ongoing process—one that never settles, never becomes static, yet fully inhabits each environment it passes through.

Translation: Anna Groesch