Kitty Brazelton, a performing artist, composer, and music professor at Bennington College in Vermont is a Pioneer. Here’s what Kitty’s peers say about her. Experimental music icon and internationally celebrated composer John Zorn says, “Kitty’s a mover and a shaker in the downtown scene; a singer, bandleader, and composer of striking originality.” Gramophone asserts, “Few composers are as uninhibited at saying exactly what they want to say.” WIRE Magazine writes, “There are few musical styles and genres she hasn’t absorbed or embraced. You might wonder how someone’s musical appetite can be quite so voracious, but the results are anarchic, wacky, and hard to resist.”
One of the lessons that Pioneers must learn is that enthusiasm and positive energy won’t make the impossible possible. Kitty chose an Objectivist as her life partner; a brilliant, but contradictory type with fixed habits, chronic control issues, and a naturally critical temperament. They fought, but also shared a lot of art and music and raised a wonderful and highly imaginative kid for eighteen years. Kitty’s low set curved pinkie fingers reveal how she sustained her partnership as long as she did. She acted as though her marriage was better than it was while compartmentalizing, analyzing, and rationalizing her feelings. She won the occasional battle, but always lost the war because she had a compulsive need to make the peace.