Sky Macklay, assistant professor of composition, traces her multifaceted creativity to her childhood, when she and her friends would make their own movies. She fondly recalls writing scripts and taking part in all aspects of the productions.
“I enjoyed the process: having a little germ of an idea and expanding it into a multimedia creation—the whole process of iterating and revising and doing the music and the sound,” she says.
Macklay now carries that multifaceted creativity with her as a visual and performance artist, composer, and teacher at the Peabody Conservatory. It’s perhaps most evident in her immersive sound installation, Harmonitrees, which involves a series of clear vinyl sculptures with embedded harmonicas that are powered by inflation devices.
Macklay says the concept was partly inspired by those “wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube people” you see outside of car dealerships. She wondered whether the air pressure of the devices could excite a reed. The resulting Harmonitrees installation has delighted visitors of all ages at the Stetson University Hand Art Center in DeLand, Florida; WoCo Fest at the Strathmore Mansion in Bethesda, Maryland; and the Warsaw Autumn Festival in Poland.
“You don’t really know what’s going to happen when the bags inflate, and that makes people smile,” she says. “I really love that.”
Harmonitrees was the third iteration of Macklay’s acoustic sound installation concept—and variation through repetition is a process that she emphasizes to students in her Composer’s Ensemble course at Peabody. Each semester, a group of composer-performers write pieces for a subset of the ensemble. Every two weeks, composers work directly with their performers, getting incremental feedback as they add more musicto the piece.
“I encourage the students to write pieces that are very tailored to their specific performers and to be open-minded to making changes along the way,” Macklay says. The dynamic is similar to that of the New York-based Ghost Ensemble, for which Macklay is a co-founder, performer, and composer.
But Macklay’s students also learn how to disagree with performers’ feedback in a constructive way.
“It’s important as a professional composer to be very communicative with your collaborators, but also to have self-confidence and the knowledge of when to stick to your guns on something,” she says.
Self-confidence is something that’s propelled Macklay throughout her career. As an oboist and composer, she’s drawn to what she calls “spicy sounds”—timbral and harmonic combinations that are “perhaps aggressive and dissonant, surprising in the context.”
She wrote her breakthrough piece, “Doppelgänger for 2 Oboes,” as a master’s student at the University of Memphis in 2012. What began as a chamber concerto for two oboes and an ensemble grew into other versions, including two oboes and an organ. The piece relies on aleatoric multiphonic unison, in which two oboes play the same multiphonics (multiple notes) at the same time.
“[Doppelgänger] felt very personal to me because I found those techniques by improvising on my oboe,” Macklay says. “Just writing that piece made me think, ‘Oh, this is something I want to do more of.’”
Since then, her work has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, among others. She’s also received several awards and prestigious honors, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.
Peabody, Macklay says, has been an ideal place to keep pushing her creative boundaries. She recently wrote the music for “Saxophone Hero,” an interactive mobile game designed by Jason Charney for the saxophone quartet, Project Fusion, led by Doug O’Connor, who joined Peabody’s saxophone faculty in 2023. The project recently received a commission from the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress and debuted in September.
Macklay is also writing a piece for a festival celebrating the work of Ruth Crawford Seeger, drawing on Seeger’s books and scores housed in in Peabody’s Arthur Friedheim Library. Every day, she says, she finds herself inspired not only by her fellow faculty but also her students.
“With all these great performers and composers around me, it’s just a wonderful stew to create from,” Macklay says.