micro/Maker by Loose Leaf Transmissions

Kurt Rohde examines the structural problems embedded in how opportunities circulate in contemporary music — how access, relationships, and institutional permission compound quietly over time, rewarding the already-known and making it nearly impossible for others to even reach the starting line. Drawing on his own experience of benefiting from systems he later came to question, Rohde argues that radical transparency is the only meaningful corrective, and points to the San Francisco Arts Commission's fully public adjudication process as a working model. The conversation moves from critique to practice: his work with the Composers Conference, his approach to selection rubrics that are simultaneously rigorous and honest about subjectivity, and a conviction rooted in his own experience growing up gay in Poughkeepsie — that community doesn't just appear, and that small acts of deliberate openness are often all it takes to make something possible for someone else.Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Austin Hammonds unpacks how taste, history, and storytelling shape his approach to film scoring. He and Tyler talk about what it means to compose for someone else’s vision, why he currently identifies more as a craftsman than an artist, and how the process of scoring often begins with shared emotional language — not music at all.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram @loose.leaf.transmissions.micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Gabriel Bolaños found music through curiosity—a household guitar, a minor second that clicked. Formal study in Belgium led him from classical guitar to counterpoint, but the shift toward composition came when his theoretical ideas outpaced his bandmates' interest. Recording alone, he discovered that constraints like pure contrary motion revealed possibilities intuition wouldn't deliver: the fascination of problem-solving over what feels natural.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

An unexpected ballet staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a chamber-orchestra miniature built on pure unison, Calvino’s literary lectures, Japanese wabi-sabi, and an Ermhoi album remix—these are the touchstones that continue to spark Tyler Kline’s imagination. He unpacks how each one cracked something open, from seeing music’s power for climate storytelling to embracing imperfection and reinvention in his own writing.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Graeme Shields reflects on how a single conversation with a mentor reshaped his idea of what it meant to be a composer—and what kind of life he wanted to build around music. He and Tyler talk about the myth of the “conventional path,” the messiness of creative careers, and how early moments of being seen can set a lifelong course.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Andrew Noseworthy reflects on how his earliest musical life — writing original material in basement hardcore and progressive metal bands — never really separated from his later identity as a composer, even when academic language and institutions entered the picture. Rather than viewing those early experiences as a detour, he describes them as the foundation of a through-line: recurring gestures, textures, and instincts that continue to surface as his music evolves. Growing up in the extreme isolation of Labrador City, with limited access to instruments, teachers, or a broader musical scene, meant learning largely by necessity — self-teaching guitar, repurposing bass guitar for wind band parts, and finding creative momentum through sheer persistence. That isolation, paired with a DIY ethic and a gradual exposure to theory and new listening through private study, shaped a musical identity that still values continuity over reinvention — an artist carrying the same core impulses forward, even as the frame around them changes.micro/Maker episodes release every weekday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.