BIOGRAPHY - MARY EDWARDS

Mary Edwards is an interdisciplinary composer and sound artist whose projects range from recordings and performances described by Time Out Magazine as "...evocative of epic cinematic scores combined with lyrical intimacy," to immersive environmental and architectural sound installations praised by the Bedford Standard-Times as, "…evocative and engaging." Themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world are interspersed throughout her work.

Her extended discography includes the solo releases, A Smile in the Mind (2007), Console (2010), Eastern/Central & Mountain/Pacific (2012), and the forthcoming works, Natural Anthem and Endeavour: A Space Trilogy (inspired by the Space Shuttle expedition of NASA astronaut, Dr. Mae C. Jemison), where she captures the essence of '60s/'70s films, Ambient Music, and Modernism. Her fourth studio album, Everyday Until Tomorrow, is a conceptual "soundtrack" for an imagined television series set in the 1960s-era TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport.

She has been commissioned as an environmental composer-in-residence for The Provincetown Museum, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Gallery, Indivisible Gallery, 429 Architectural Spaces, The William T. Davis Conservancy, and The Beach Institute to compose and design, using sound as a spatial form, such works as the bioacoustic The Space Between: A Sound Trilogy, which has been described in its nascence by writer Katt Lissard as "...an intriguing and important project which acknowledges the role of humans in the way architecture functions (or doesn't) in our culture. Mary Edwards hopes to take space back for all of us, not through the seizure of property or the redefinition of place, but though the use of melody and phrasing and multi-aural overlay." Edwards engages with these ideas to unpack and reframe the notion of sound as a means of enhancing one’s spatial experience in relation to history—corresponding with her interest in personal narratives that fill the nuances of collective events. Her objective is to create a favorable human condition, and support reactions and emotions without directing them; it's an approach to the discipline that architect Juhani Pallasmaa calls "Sensuous Minimalism,” where a certain neutrality, restraint, and silence are an inherent quality of the practice.

Edwards is also credited for film, theatre and television scores (including BBC, PBS, NPR, The Learning Channel, and ABC-TV), and is a member of ASCAP. She holds an Intersiciplinary Master of Fine Arts from Goddard College and lectures on Acoustic Ecology (music and the relationship, mediated through sound, between living beings and their environment). She lives in New York and works internationally.