Keren Rosenbaum

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

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A composer, conductor, cross-disciplinary researcher, educator, and mother whose work brings composition, listening, sensory perception, communication, and playfulness into artistic, educational, therapeutic, and community practice.

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For more than thirty years, Rosenbaum has explored what happens when different forms collide while remaining distinct: sound, movement, taste, touch, individual expression and shared form. The parts remain perceptible, while their relations may give rise to an organization larger than any one of them. Once such an organization takes form, its realization can vary. she began her musical studies at the age of seven, developing 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 Conservatory in The Hague, and Brooklyn College in New York.

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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, to name a few. Her compositional thinking has also been shaped by her synesthetic experience. Sound has never existed for her entirely apart from movement, space, taste, texture, and bodily sensation. Cross-sensory relations therefore entered her work first as lived perception and compositional material, long before they became part of her theoretical research.​ Beginning in the early 1990s, Rosenbaum developed the Reflex Invisible Score, an technique of composition and music notation in which independently organized information could be carried through sound, visual material, movement, physical action, and individualized earphone clicktracks. Several distinct lines could unfold simultaneously while participating in a larger compositional organization.

 

From this work developed Reflexive Music.

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In the late 1990s, Rosenbaum founded the REFLEX Ensemble, an interdisciplinary group of musicians and artists that became a central laboratory for her compositional practice. Through performances, installations, festivals, contemporary notation, electronic and prerecorded sound, participatory scores, and OperaGames, she continued to explore relations among composer, performer, conductor, audience, media, and environment.

Rosenbaum's conducting-via-earphones technique and Reflex Invisible Score practice were featured in Theresa Sauer’s Notations21. During this period, Rosenbaum also taught composition, music theory, music history, twentieth-century notation, flute, and chamber music, and was invited to give master classes in composition and performance at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.

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Her artistic and educational work in New York included The Project Room at the Chelsea Art Museum, where she served as an educational advisor and developed workshops, master classes, and educational programs, as well as projects with the Electronic Music Foundation and REFLEX Ensemble events at the Chelsea Art Museum. Selected collaborations from this wider body of work include international artists, performers, educators, and cultural organizations worldwide.

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The listening required by these compositions gradually widened beyond musical performance itself.

Reflexive Music developed into Reflexive Listening Practice and Reflexive Listening Practice. Listening came to include sound together with movement, rhythm, timing, breath, intensity, gesture, touch, distance, silence, spatial relation, sensory experience, and environment. The listener also entered the field being attended to: how one listens and responds changes the conditions of what can happen next.​ From this developed Reflexive Communication, carrying the same compositional attention into human interaction. Communication could be followed across verbal, nonverbal, paraverbal, bodily, sensory, emotional, and relational forms.

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These practices gave rise to the Playground Approach (ALP: Active ⇄ Attune Listening Playground), which brings together the Reflexive Listening methodology to practice multisensory communication and playfulness. ALP core framework, the Operagame moves among the perspectives I—YOU—WE—WORLD: attention to the self, another person, the shared organization emerging between participants, materials, spaces, communities, cultures, and environments. The OperaGame process of FIND – PLAY – SHARE – CREATE continues to shape what we are noticing that's already there, engaging with it through play, and bringing it into relation with others. The perspectives remain distinct while continually reshaping one another’s conditions, colliding in co-creation.

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In 2013, Rosenbaum founded the Composing Community as the home for this work. Through Composing Community, supervised projects developed in schools, universities, refugee camps, post-conflict communities, arts institutions, special-education environments, mental-health settings, and community organizations across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. Selected collaborations have included,the Streaming Museum, Musicians Without Borders (MWS), Rega Center, UNESCO, WE-ACT, Peace Corps, Goethe-Institut, Al Akhawayn University, the University of the Arts Helsinki / Sibelius Academy, Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, the Felicia Blumental Music Center and Library and the Chelsea Art Museum, to name a few.

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Since 2021, an ongoing collaboration with the Felicia Blumental Music Center and Library in Tel Aviv, produced playgrounds in educational, artistic, and communities. Among the projects is the Noise Scouts of Jaffa, which brought neighboring Orthodox Christian and Muslim Scout communities into a sustained process of environmental listening, graphic notation, participatory composition, and shared relational leadership across fourteen Mini-Playgrounds. The project continued under conditions of war, public insecurity, and institutional instability and culminated in a shared public Playground involving participants, guest artists, families, and community members.

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In recent years, her sustained work with autistic children and adults, together with therapists, educators, families, and professional teams, has become an important direction of Rosenbaum’s practice. This work further developed Reflexive Listening and Reflexive Communication in contexts where spoken language may be limited or insufficient to describe the communication taking place. These encounters brought Rosenbaum’s compositional work into closer dialogue with questions of communication. Together with Miriam Ben Oz, MSW, a clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and supervisor of therapists, Rosenbaum began examining the methodology of Reflexive Listening and how it can be applied in the therapeutic field.

 

The research developed into a theoretical paper, Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns: On the Continuity of Organization Across Its Changing Realizations, awaiting review at Human Development (Karger). The research brings a compositional question into conversation with developmental theory, vitality, co-regulation, participatory sense-making, coordination, variation, dynamic systems, embodied approaches to autism, and human development. The collaboration expands and continues to develop in dialogue with Prof. Bracha Nir, whose background in language, discourse, linguistic variation, communication, and language development brings another perspective to questions of form, meaning, and communicative organization.

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Rosenbaum 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".