Jacob
Southerland

My weeks belong to St. Mary’s School in Portage, Wisconsin, where I teach K–8 general music full time and direct the Joyful Choir — some thirty young singers who lead music for school Masses, the annual Christmas concert, and everything in between. The conviction posted above my classroom window runs the whole operation: singing is praying twice.

Current work includes preparing the Joyful Choir’s season of liturgies and concerts and serving as vocal director for Portage’s community-theatre production of Young Frankenstein (fall 2026). I program repertoire the way I hope choirs will someday program mine: worth the rehearsal hours, with text that means something to the people singing it.

Everything I write for voices starts from the singer’s side of the podium.

Alongside the pencil-and-paper work lives a second practice in Max/MSP — patches that listen, bend pitch, and generate image as readily as sound. What began as coursework in electronics has become a working studio for pieces that no notation program could hold: controller-driven visuals, trombone with live processing, and microtonal spaces that sit deliberately outside the tempered grid.

Music of the Spheres (below) is the flagship: a game controller held in both hands steers a Jitter universe of orbiting matter in real time — the performer plays the sky, not the notes. Current work pairs these systems with acoustic instruments and continues into the research behind my thesis on tuning, reference frames, and what we choose to call “microtonality.”

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