Content note: This episode briefly touches on suicidal ideation and sexual assault.

On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Lillian Yee.

San Francisco Bay Area-based Lillian Yee (余慧森) has built a creative practice that resists easy categorization. Her music has been performed internationally across Australia, Finland, Germany, and Canada, and throughout the United States — most notably Miracles of the Human Condition for brass quintet, commissioned by a consortium of seven quintets and performed by Axiom Brass, Calliope Brass, and Seraph Brass, among others. She composes in classical and contemporary idioms while also performing across jazz, Brazilian, and world music traditions, co-founded the Women Composers Collective, and is currently completing her training as a Certified Music Practitioner — someone who delivers live, improvised therapeutic music to patients in clinical settings. Her first LP as a singer-songwriter is due in 2026.

In this conversation, Lillian and Tyler trace a path that begins with her grandmother's Buddhist chanting and a first piece composed at the piano and recorded onto a cassette Walkman, moves through elaborate Sheena Ringo arrangements for school diversity days, the institutional frustrations of studying composition formally, and a deliberate turn away from academia toward indie rock bands and Brazilian music — and arrives at a practice where composing, performing, healing, and community-building are all expressions of the same thing. They talk about what it means to make music as medicine rather than as performance, what a highly sensitive nervous system has to teach a composer about sound and empathy, how Lillian got to the other side of a crisis in 2019 and what she found there, and why she believes making art is the ultimate form of love.

Learn more about Lillian and hear her work at https://www.lillianyee.com/

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music/Maker episodes release every other Thursday! Listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com

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music/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer, performer, installation artist, and educator Rob Funkhouser.

Based in Indianapolis, Rob Funkhouser builds instruments out of metal mixing bowls, copper pipe, plywood, glass rods, and whatever else is at hand — and then writes music for them. His work engages ideas of place, memory, and pattern, and interrogates assumptions embedded in both art music performance and music education. He is composer in residence and artistic director for Sound Ecologies, a resident artist with Big Car Collaborative, and teaches music technology at the Herron School of Art. His installation work has reached thousands of people through exhibitions at the Guichelaar Gallery, at Spark Monument Circle, and at Burning Man. Recent premieres span solo piano to symphony orchestra.

In this conversation, Rob and Tyler trace a path that begins with singing along to a vacuum cleaner, moves through a failed timpani audition at Indiana University, a philosophy detour, a depression, a chance encounter at a Starbucks in Richmond, Indiana, and six years running a percussion museum in the basement of a mall — and arrives at a practice where composing, building, performing, and community-making are all expressions of the same restless curiosity. They talk about what draws a composer to build instruments rather than synthesize sounds, how translation between formats and formats unlocks new musical ideas, why the blank page is the enemy and a music box is the cure, and what it means to make music that surprises people with simple things.

Listen to Rob’s music on his website, https://www.robfunkhouser.com/, and view his built instruments at https://www.robfunkhouser.com/builds/

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music/Maker episodes release every other Thursday! Listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com

Subscribe to the Loose Leaf Transmissions newsletter for new episodes, behind-the-scenes updates, and ways to support the work: looseleaftransmissions.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Support us on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions

Follow along on Instagram @loose.leaf.transmissions

music/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On today's episode of music/Maker with Tyler Kline, Tyler is joined by composer, performer, and educator Brittany J. Green.

Brittany's music works to create intimate, collaborative musical spaces at the intersection of sound, video, movement, and text — described by the Washington Post as "a creative force of attention-seizing versatility" and by the Chicago Classical Review as "cinematic in the best sense." Her recent work engages sonification and Black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems. Her music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW series, and Miller Theater, with collaborators including Alarm Will Sound, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and JACK Quartet. She holds a Ph.D from Duke University and teaches composition and music theory at East Carolina University.

In this conversation, Brittany traces a path from a family friend's piano to a clarinet piece about the rock cycle written in sixth grade, through a music education degree, a master's at East Carolina where she fell into the deep end of composition for the first time, and a doctorate at Duke — arriving at a practice where composing, theorizing, teaching, and advocacy are all expressions of the same central question: what can music actually do? They talk about Black feminist theory not as a theme but as a structural methodology — a way of embedding the politics into the formal behavior of the music itself, down to every fiber. They discuss whether a piece of music can be a form of political action rather than just representing one, the DIY music scenes of Durham and Louisville as radical experimental spaces hiding in plain sight, silence as an active compositional element rather than an absence, narration as a rhythmic voice within the ensemble, and the experience of developing a compositional voice — and then trying to get lost again.

Learn more about Brittany and her music on her website: https://www.brittanyjgreen.com/

music/Maker episodes release every other Thursday. Listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com

Subscribe to the Loose Leaf Transmissions newsletter for new episodes, behind-the-scenes updates, and ways to support the work: looseleaftransmissions.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Support us on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions

Follow along on Instagram @loose.leaf.transmissions

music/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.