Keren Rosenbaum

Composer | Conductor | Performer | Educator | Researcher | Group Facilitator

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Keren Rosenbaum is a mother, composer, conductor, performer, cross-disciplinary researcher, educator, and group facilitator. Her work brings composition, listening, sensory perception, communication, and play into artistic, educational, therapeutic, and community practice.

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She began her musical studies at the age of seven and built a broad foundation in composition, flute, cello, conducting, electronic music, performance, improvisation, and music education. She studied at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University, the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, and Brooklyn College in New York. Among her teachers were Lev Kogan, Yossi Arnheim, Arie Shapira, Louis Andriessen, Gilius van Bergeijk, Richard DeMan, Diderik Wagenaar, Clarence Barlow, Amnon Wolman, and Tania León.

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Her compositional thinking grew from synesthetic experience. For her, sound has always lived together with movement, space, taste, texture, and bodily sensation. Cross-sensory relations entered her work first as lived perception and compositional material, long before they became a subject of research. For more than thirty years she has explored what happens when different forms meet and each keeps its own character. Each part stays perceptible, and the relations among them give rise to an organization larger than any one of them, one whose realization can vary once it takes form.

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In the early 1990s she developed the Reflex Invisible Score, a technique of composition and notation in which independently organized information travels through sound, visual material, movement, physical action, and individual earphone click tracks. Several lines unfold at once, each taking part in a larger compositional organization. From this work grew Reflexive Music, and in the late 1990s she founded the REFLEX Ensemble, an interdisciplinary group of musicians and artists that became the laboratory for her practice. Through performances, installations, festivals, participatory scores, and Operagames, the ensemble explored the relations among composer, performer, conductor, audience, media, and environment. Her conducting-via-earphones technique and the Reflex Invisible Score were featured in Theresa Sauer’s Notations21.

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During these years she taught composition, music theory, music history, twentieth-century notation, flute, and chamber music, and gave master classes at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. In New York she served as educational advisor to The Project Room at the Chelsea Art Museum, developing workshops, master classes, and educational programs, and worked on projects with the Electronic Music Foundation.

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The listening her compositions asked for gradually widened beyond the concert. Reflexive Music developed into the Reflexive Listening Practice, where listening includes sound together with movement, rhythm, timing, breath, intensity, gesture, touch, distance, silence, and space. The listener becomes part of what is heard: how one listens and responds shapes what can happen next. From this grew Reflexive Communication, which carries the same compositional attention into what passes between people.

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These practices gave rise to the Playground Approach (ALP: Active ⇄ Attune Listening Playground), which uses the Reflexive Listening methodology to practice cross-sensory communication and playfulness. At its core is the Operagame structure. Its perspectives, I – YOU – WE – WORLD, move attention from oneself to another person, to the shared organization emerging between participants, and out to materials, spaces, communities, and environments. Its process, FIND – PLAY – SHARE – CREATE, moves from noticing what is already there, to playing with it, to bringing it into relation with others, to creating from it.

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In 2013 she founded the Composing Community, as the home for this work. Supervised projects have developed in schools, universities, refugee camps, post-conflict communities, arts institutions, special-education and mental-health settings, and community organizations across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. Collaborations include the Goethe-Institut, Musicians Without Borders, CulturalEU, the Streaming Museum, Rega Center, WE-ACT, Peace Corps, Al Akhawayn University, the University of the Arts Helsinki / Sibelius Academy, Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, the Chelsea Art Museum to name few. Since 2021 an ongoing collaboration with the Felicia Blumental Music Center and Library in Tel Aviv has produced various playgrounds in educational, artistic, and community settings, among them the Noise Scouts of Jaffa, which brought neighboring Orthodox Christian and Muslim Scout communities into a sustained process of environmental listening and participatory composition, continuing through war and culminating in a public Playground.

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In recent years, sustained work with autistic children and adults, together with therapists, educators, families, and professional teams, has become a central direction of her practice. This includes systemic work in special education in northern New Jersey with educational psychologist Dr. Michelle Terzini-Hollar. In these encounters, where much of what passes between people unfolds beyond spoken language, Reflexive Listening and Reflexive Communication developed further, and her compositional work came into closer dialogue with therapeutic practice.

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With psychotherapist Miriam Ben-Oz, MSW, she researches the theoretical foundations of the Playground Approach and its applications in psychology, social work, and therapy. Their paper, “Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns: On the Continuity of Organization Across Its Changing Realizations,” has been accepted for publication in Human Development (Karger). It brings a compositional question into conversation with developmental theory, drawing on work on vitality, co-regulation, participatory sense-making, coordination, variation, dynamic systems, and embodied approaches to autism. 

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Today Rosenbaum teaches an international course of the Playground Approach at the University of Haifa and develops educational and therapeutic programs that support families with neurodivergent members in particular. She dedicates her time to research, writing, and working with students on their creative development, and continues to approach listening, communication, and participation from where she began, as a composer and conductor, or, in her own words, “…finding more friends to play with.”