micro/Maker by Loose Leaf Transmissions

Nicky Sohn traces a real shift in how she lives and works back to meeting her husband Nate, whose ordinary nine-to-five routine — gym at six, regular hours, a clean line between work and the rest of life — struck her as almost unbelievable after years immersed entirely in musician culture, where identity and self-worth get tied up completely in career outcomes. Watching her brother Justin's old nine-to-five (before he left it to become a ceramicist) planted a similar idea: what if composing worked that way too. The bigger realization underneath both is that music isn't life or death, despite what conservatory training can leave people feeling — that a slow commission year doesn't make her a terrible person. She's since pulled back from all-night writing sessions and constant email responsiveness, trying to build in actual breathing room. Marrying outside the music world has helped in another way: Nate offers something composers rarely give each other, plain, unguarded encouragement, alongside occasional outsider feedback sharp enough to be genuinely useful, like noticing that an opening passage didn't sound like a beginning at all.

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

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

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Han Hitchen shares how his identity as a queer, transgender, nonbinary man has shaped his music, from early subconscious works to intentional explorations of belonging and transformation. He reflects on the freedom he’s found in embracing both masculinity and femininity, and how composition became a vehicle for expressing identity with honesty and depth. For Han, music is not just notes on a page—it’s a way of making visible the truths of selfhood.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissions

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

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

Michael Frazier outlines three guiding pillars that now shape his creative life: fun, patience, and the embrace of identity. Reflecting on earlier periods where composition felt more dutiful than joyful, he describes how reconnecting with jazz, rhythm, and later his Latino heritage fundamentally shifted his relationship to writing music. Fun becomes not a distraction from rigor, but a necessary condition for sustained artistic investment; patience allows musical ideas the space to unfold fully; and identity offers a source of sincerity rather than constraint. Through recent works shaped by rhythm, dance, and cultural memory, Frazier describes a turning point where composition becomes not only meaningful, but genuinely enjoyable again.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions. Follow us on social media @LooseLeafTransmissions.

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

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

Ania Vu discusses The Music She Writes, a project co-created with pianist Eunmi Ko to spotlight the work of Asian women composers. She talks about curation, community, and the power of making space for others — all while resisting narrow definitions of identity-based programming.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on social media @LooseLeafTransmissions.

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

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

For Christopher Stark, what makes a residency valuable has little to do with geography. Across stints in Italy, Norway, and upstate New York, location left almost no mark on the work itself — the people did, offering a rare baseline of cross-disciplinary curiosity and genuine attention that felt validating in a way daily life rarely does. Residencies also provide distance: a chance to step outside routine and assess whether it's actually serving his goals. A year in Rome clarified this from the opposite direction — Stark found himself missing the chaotic, diverse American art scene he could move through in a single week, despite conditions he describes as inhospitable to art-making. That contrast extends to artistic community itself: away from home, everyone starts from a baseline of mutual unfamiliarity, but in St. Louis, identity, history, and local politics attach to everything, including a string quartet, in a city with little of the ironic distance found in scenes elsewhere.

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissions

micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

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Baljinder Sekhon talks about intuition, timbre, and the gap between the music we love and the music we create. He reflects on early experiences with sound, the influence of Mario Davidovsky, and why loving many kinds of music can actually make it harder to define a singular voice as a composer.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on social media @LooseLeafTransmissions.

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

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

C. Jacqueline Wood reflects on art-making through the lens of loss, disillusionment, and resilience. Once embedded in the world of festivals and nonprofits, she has shifted toward creating on her own terms—outside the systems of grants, gatekeepers, and institutions. In this conversation, she speaks about why she no longer measures success by accolades, how her microcinema became a space for nurturing potential, and why sometimes the most important work emerges when artists stop waiting for permission.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissions

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

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

Phong Tran reflects on how disillusionment with the classical commissioning system led him to create a more autonomous performance practice. He shares candid thoughts on the institutional structures that shape musical labor, and how writing an essay for I Care If You Listen helped clarify his position.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on social media @LooseLeafTransmissions.

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

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

Satisfaction is slippery. Tyler Kline and Marc Mellits trade notes on finishing a piece, cringing at what they’d change, and carrying those fixes into the next work. Mellits lays out his “three thirds” view—composer, performer, audience—arguing that interpretation by great players (and the listeners who complete the circuit) transforms notes on a page into art. Along the way they celebrate how performers can uncover things in a score the composer didn’t know were there.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissions

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

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

Chris Opperman remembers the day Final Fantasy music struck him like lightning. What began as a teenage obsession with Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtracks turned into a surreal journey—meeting his hero, joining the Distant Worlds team, and eventually orchestrating music for Final Fantasy concerts across the globe. From Carnegie Hall to Japan, Opperman shares how a lifelong fandom became a career bringing joy to thousands of gamers and concertgoers alike.

micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.

Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.

Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissions

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

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