Once upon a time, the bell in the Jaffrey Meetinghouse was ringing at some very odd hours.
It was all in the name of college research, as Leah Reid wanted to study the sounds her hometown’s bell made, specifically its timbre, which she calls “a catalyst for exploring new soundscapes, time, space, perception and color.” So she got permission to ring the bell at various hours, including at night, when she got the cleanest recordings.
“I’ve always loved the sounds that surround us in our everyday lives,” she said. “I recorded the bell underneath and at a distance, in the bell tower itself. It made quite a few people in the center wonder what was going on.”
Reid, 36, is now a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, as well as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where she is on leave from teaching courses in music composition and technology. She recently was one of 180 writers, artists and scholars chosen to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation “on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise,” according to the announcement from the Guggenheim Foundation.
“It is a huge honor. I’m very grateful to have been honored,” she said. “I’m looking forward to having the time and the funding to pursue this project over the next year.”
Created and initially funded in 1925 by U.S. Sen. Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the foundation works to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Reid’s fellowship is for music composition, and the project she will be working on over the next year is a series of electroacoustic and acousmatic – specifically created for presentation using loudspeakers – works, including new solo works for piano, saxophone and percussion with electronics. If time allows, she will also compose two or three acousmatic pieces focused on kitchen and cooking sounds, gardening and environmental soundscapes.
She now lives in Woburn, Mass., but said, “Jaffrey is my home, my childhood home.” Her mother Chris is a painter who still lives in Jaffrey, and last year they developed a collaboration featuring Chris’ paintings and Leah’s music.
“It was all sounds from the center and Mom painting and talking about her work,” Reid said.
Chris Reid said the Guggenheim Fellowship is deserved acclaim for what her daughter has accomplished.
“It’s hard being a woman and doing all this stuff. It’s just really good to have her recognized,” she said. “It’s such an amazing thing. She just had these humble beginnings, and look at where she’s gone.”
The Guggenheim Fellowship isn’t the only happy news in Reid’s life lately, as she and her husband James Demuth had their first child, Alexander Sebastian Reid DeMuth, March 25. Her mother is staying with the family in Woburn to help out, and Reid said she will be able to devote herself fully to the fellowship when it starts in August.
“We’re so excited and lucky to have him in our lives,” Reid said. “He’s an inspiration and a little bundle of joy.”