BIOGRAPHY
BRIAN HARNETTY (American, b. 1973) is an interdisciplinary composer, artist, and writer who uses sound and listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to "working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them" (Clive Bell, The Wire). In the fall of 2025, Harnetty will publish his first book — Noisy Memory: Recording Sound, Performing Archives — with the University of North Carolina Press.
Photo: Jennifer Harnetty
Harnetty is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, two MAP Fund Awards, the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices, and a National Performance Network Award. He has also received MOJO Magazine’s “Underground Album of the Year” two times.
Harnetty works with sound archives and the communities connected to them, creating encounters that are centered on place and the transformative power of listening. For example, his recent project Words and Silences is a musical portrait of Kentucky monk and writer Thomas Merton, fusing archival recordings of Merton’s voice with newly composed music. Since 2010, Harnetty’s projects have brought together myth, history, ecology, and economy in Appalachian Ohio, informed by his family's roots there.
Harnetty’s creative process uses a hybrid of media, including sounds, images, music, and words. Rooted in socially engaged art and sonic ethnography, his work flows between the fields of performance, recording, installation, and writing. Each project begins with communities and local archives, and moves outward to include intimate portraits of everyday people and landscapes of Appalachia and the Midwest. For two decades, this has led to projects with the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, the Sun Ra/El Saturn Archives in Chicago, the Anne Grimes Collection in the Library of Congress, and the Thomas Merton Collection at Bellarmine University in Kentucky.
Photo: Jennifer Harnetty
Harnetty has released ten albums and EPs: The Workbench (2024), Words and Silences (2022), Forest Listening Rooms (2021), Many Hands - The Complete Collection (2021), Shawnee, Ohio (2019), Ohio National Forest (2019), Rawhead & Bloodybones (2015), The Star-Faced One (2013), Silent City (2009), and American Winter (2007). The albums have received much international critical praise; in 2019 and again in 2022, for example, MOJO Magazine gave 5 / 5 stars for both Shawnee, Ohio and Words and Silences. Harnetty’s music is on Winesap Records (Ohio), Karl Records (Berlin), Dust-to-Digital (Atlanta), Atavistic (Chicago), and Scioto Records (Ohio). He has collaborated and performed with many musicians, including Anna Roberts-Gevalt (Anna & Elizabeth), Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jeremy Woodruff, Katie Porter Maxwell (Red Desert), Paul De Jong (The Books), Phil Rodriguez (Beirut), Tyler J. Borden (Mivos Quartet), William Lang (Loadbang Ensemble), the Unheard-Of Ensemble, and Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy).
As a sound artist, Harnetty’s installations have been exhibited across the country and internationally, including Errant Sound (Berlin, Germany), Listen Gallery (Glasgow, Scotland), the Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio), Headlands Center for the Arts (California), Audible Gallery (Chicago), the New York Historical Society, MOCA Cleveland, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, the Gund Gallery (Ohio), Ross Art Museum (Ohio), Massillon Museum (Ohio), and many other colleges and universities. As a writer, Harnetty has contributed to The Daily Yonder, 100 Days in Appalachia, New Music Box, Resonance: the Journal of Sound and Culture, Experimental Music Yearbook, Sound Effects, Rethinking Marxism, and Cultural Studies. He has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards (2020, 2016, 2003); commissions from the Wexner Center for the Arts, Duke Performances, Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University, the Unheard-Of Ensemble, the Promusica Chamber Orchestra, and the Johnstone Fund for New Music; artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (California), Marble House Project (Vermont), and Loghaven (Tennessee); and additional grants and fellowships from the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives and the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
Harnetty working at the Loghaven Artist Residency, Knoxville. Image courtesy of Poynter Photo.
Harnetty lives in Columbus, Ohio. He currently teaches both Composition and Musicology in the School of Music at Ohio State, and was recently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State’s Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme. He has also taught music and interdisciplinary arts at Kenyon College (Ohio), Goddard College (Vermont), and Ohio University. Harnetty earned a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University, with a focus on sonic ethnography, sound studies, and sound art. He studied music composition with Michael Finnissy and Robert Saxton and was mentored by Steve Martland at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he earned an M.Mus. He earned a B.Mus. in Music Composition and Theory from The Ohio State University.
Increasingly, Harnetty has had an active public engagement and speaking schedule. This includes public talks with author and activist Robin Wall Kimmerer, filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon, a radio feature on NPR’s Here and Now, numerous podcasts and interviews, and as a featured speaker for the American Musicological Society’s “Many Musics” series (forthcoming, 2025). From 2018 to 2019, he was an AmeriCorps Volunteer in Shawnee, Ohio. He continues to work for non-profit organizations in Appalachian Ohio, helping to enact social and environmental change there. He also serves as the Board President for Sunday Creek Associates, a non-profit based in Shawnee, Ohio that is focused on positive, equitable, and sustainable community development across the Little Cities of Black Diamonds region.