Pamela Z (born 1956) is an American composer, performer, and media artist best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.
Z's solo albums are Echolocation (1987), and A Delay is Better (2004), and A Secret Code (2021). Her fixed-media sound works for radio and new media installations for art galleries have manifested in solo exhibitions at the Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, Illinois), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), Trondheim Elektroniske Kunstsenter (Trondheim, Norway), the Fine Arts Center Galleries at Bowling Green State University, and the Chico University Art Gallery (Chico, California), and in group exhibitions in the Dakar Biennale, Sénégal, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum, Cologne, and the McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, North Carolina.
In addition to being a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist in Residence, Z has received a United States Artists fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Walter Hinrichsen Award, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in theater, the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts, the Creative Capital Fund, the ASCAP Music Award (for 17 years), the MAP Fund (twice), and an NEA, and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. Her work and performances have been reviewed in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Express, the Wire, and the Washington Post, among other places.
Early life and education
Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in the Denver Metro area, Pamela Z received her bachelor's degree in music from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978, where she studied classical voice. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she worked as a singer-songwriter on voice and guitar throughout Colorado under the name Pam Brooks.
Career
Brooks began experimenting with digital delay and reverb to process her voice in the early 1980s and started composing works involving live looping.
In 1984 she relocated to San Francisco where she legally changed her last name to Z and became active in the San Francisco Bay Area contemporary music and performance art scene. Throughout the late 1980s and the '90s, she continued to create solo voice and electronics performances, and gained visibility through her appearances in area new music performance venues, theaters, and art galleries. She began touring her work nationally and internationally and, by 2000, she was performing regularly in New York City, Europe, and Japan. Z has performed in such festivals as Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York City, the Interlink Festival in Japan, Other Minds in San Francisco, La Biennale di Venezia in Venice, and Pina Bausch Tanztheater's Festival in Wuppertal, Germany.
In addition to her solo voice and electronics works, Z has composed chamber works commissioned by contemporary music soloists and ensembles such as Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Eighth Blackbird, flautist Claire Chase, the New York string quartet ETHEL, Del Sol Quartet, the California EAR Unit, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and Orchestra of St. Luke's.
In 2013 she was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet to produce a new work, "And the Movement of the Tongue," at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. San Francisco Chronicle'''s music critic Joshua Kosman described the work as "witty and beautifully touching" and "encapsulat[ing] the vivacity" of San Francisco.
The next year she created the soundscape for Jo Kreiter's “Multiple Mary and Invisible Jane,” a free 30-minute show that took place on an 80-foot wall of University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Z sampled and processed voices of homeless women telling their personal stories. Z has also composed scores for modern choreographers Stephan Koplowitz, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), and Mary Armentrout.
In 2022 Z was one of several composers commissioned by soprano Julia Bullock to create new work for her History's Persistent Voice for the San Francisco Symphony.