Emily and Kaitlin Webster-Zuber: Pianists, Composers and Producers, Making Their Mark on LA’s Musical Community

Emily and Kaitlin Webster-Zuber have been regular participants at the Sunset ChamberFest Workshop since 2020. Emily and Kaitlin’s music was workshopped and performed at last year’s Festival by Yoshi Masuda and Sara Andon. The sisters lead multi-faceted lives where their roles as pianists, composers and producers are intimately and dynamically linked.

Could you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Kaitlin: Emily and I are sisters, pianists, and composers currently pursuing our degrees in Piano Performance – with a focus on our work as a piano duo together – at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Brentwood. As natives of Los Angeles, we have wonderful opportunities to work with many local organizations and professionals as we develop and nurture our musical endeavors. Whether it be performing, composing, producing or helping with production of concerts, as sisters, we are looking for possibilities to evolve and immerse ourselves with the Los Angeles musical community. We appreciate our work experiences with LA’s historic chamber music organizations, The Music Guild and The Da Camera Society, as well as with organizations such as the American Society of Cinematographers, Salastina, The Wallis Annenberg Center of the Performing Arts, Los Angeles Public Library, Junior Chamber Music, and others. And, we really enjoy opportunities when we can stay local and participate in festivals.

You are both accomplished pianists and composers. Do your playing styles and composition styles inform and influence one another or are they quite separate pursuits?

Emily: Much of the repertoire I play as a pianist does influence my composition styles. Since I have pieces in my head and hands for a long time, I’ll sometimes be inspired to develop short phrases or motives, or analyze musical forms I would like to study in my compositions. Similarly, when composing, I always continue discovering piano solo/duo/ensemble repertoire in order to explore unique harmonic colors and sound worlds. The personal musical experiences I have are enabling me to be exposed to many different music cultures which I want to further discover and evolve within my own compositions.

Emily Webster-Zuber was the recipient of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award 2021 for Ocean Waves

Kaitlin: Absolutely – my playing and composition styles not only influence one another, they also motivate each other. The sound world I surround myself in helps shape and develop my musical personality and this then allows me to put my ‘life experiences’ into the music. Additionally, the music I play and listen to typically affects my compositional choices in colors of sound, instrumentation, how I think about phrasing, etcetera. 

I’ll add, it is important to me that I learn how to produce music and not just consume it. Through musical creation, we carry on our valuable musical culture and this can help all of us appreciate and develop the much larger social culture. For example, Emily and I performed a work by local composer Juan Pablo Contreras titled Mariachitlán for piano duet. The piece successfully  interweaves elements of Classical and Mariachi music together. While learning and performing his work, we got to musically immerse ourselves in the world and flavors of Jalisco’s traditional Mariachi music while simultaneously remaining comfortable within the technical aspects of the Classical music world. It is through this meaningful and creative intermixing of genres that we can really start to expand the larger musical culture!

And, if you were wondering – although we are very close siblings who have gone through the same musical training, our composition styles and approach can be very noticeably different – it has been proven time and time again…just goes to show how diversity is alive and well within music culture!

As composers and pianists, with a great entrepreneurial energy, are your energies equally divided amongst these pursuits, or do certain ones take precedence?

Honestly, our energy towards the pursuit of becoming productive musicians is by nature multifaceted! Somewhat obvious, our current role as college students pursuing degrees focuses much of our energy on school. However, we continue to take part in a wide array of both musical and nonmusical efforts. We both agree that these valuable roles influence our “best” practices and further our goal of becoming our personal best. So, there is fluctuation in what might take precedence because, really, we are building momentum for the future.

The two of you co-founded Musical Traces. Could you tell us about this?                 

Musical Traces has been an instrument (pun intended!) for our continued interest in sharing classical music throughout our local communities. We have hosted concerts with the Los Angeles Public Library, the Veterans Administration, the Blind Children’s Center, and more. We named these performances “Play Alouds” because we are playing musical stories aloud! We also presented “Iconic Sounds” as a way of teaching audiation skills to the listener.

Moving online for the last two years enabled us to collaborate with family and friends in creating combined artistic expressions of music with art, visual media/film, storytelling/audio drama, and dance. Pretty consistently, we have been involved in all aspects of outreach concerts, interdisciplinary musical projects, and privately produced concerts. We started Musical Traces in 2016 as a reaction to our growing student community outreach programming and currently we are focusing some of these efforts on working alongside The Music Guild to facilitate the donation and adoption of pianos and other instruments to music students, churches, schools, and others.

What do your ideal lives look like in the next 5-10 years?

Haha…We know the ideal is always more difficult than we can imagine it to be! Our commitment is to an idea of “sibling work”…the ideal would be producing our own music that deeply affects the interests and values of our life and sharing it with our family, friends, and local community.  Or, we’ll be on the beach in Hawaii, ukulele in hand, composing under an umbrella…well, maybe not in 5 years, but someday…

Are there any other projects or information you would like to share with us?

Thanks for asking! Yes we have a few projects in the works and information we are very excited to share!

First, we are playing locally in an all-Mozart Concerto*Fest at the end of July.

Second, we are currently producing a two piano/two violin project with violinist Martin Chalifour, inspired by different aspects of our home residence (from the architectural space designed and created by our parents, to how we occupy the space. Yes, the concert will be at our house!).

Next season, at Mount Saint Mary’s University, we will be composing and performing works with Derrick Skye for members of his ensemble, Bridge to Everywhere (the resident ensemble of MSMU).

And, super exciting news! Kaitlin and I will be premiering a two-piano version of Ian Krouse’s piece Etudes for Two Pianos: “Reverie, Blues and Elegy,” originally written for guitar quartet.

We are also setting up a few summer performance programs. We would love to see you so stay tuned for more details by checking in with our website and subscribing to our newsletter here.