Susan Alcorn


Susan Alcorn was an American composer, improvisor, and pedal steel guitarist.
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Life and career

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Alcorn started playing guitar at the age of twelve and quickly immersed herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy Waters steered her towards playing slide guitar. By the time she was 21, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing bands in Texas.
Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world.
By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist "deep listening" philosophies of Pauline Oliveros.
Though mostly a solo performer, Alcorn collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald, Chris Cutler, Joe Giardullo, Caroline Kraabel, Ingrid Laubrock, Le Quan Ninh, Josephine Foster, Joe McPhee, Vinny Golia and Ken Vandermark, LaDonna Smith, Mike Cooper, Walter Daniels, Ellen Fullman, Jandek, George Burt, Janel Leppin, Michael Formanek, Ellery Eskelin, Fred Frith, Maggie Nicols, Evan Parker, Johanna Varner, Zane Campbell, Mary Halvorson and Bill Embleton and the Severn Run Country Band.
She wrote on the subject of music for the UK magazine Resonance and CounterPunch. Her article "The Road the Radio, and the Full Moon" was included in "The Best Music Writing of 2006" published by Da Capo Press.
Alcorn lived in Houston, then Baltimore later in life. She was married to photographer David Lobato. Alcorn died of natural causes at her home in northeast Baltimore on January 31, 2025.

Discography

  • "Uma"
  • "Curandera", "Concentration"
  • "And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar"
  • "Touch This Moment"
  • "Soledad"
  • "Evening Tales".
  • "Prism Mirror Lens"
  • "Invitation to a Dream
  • "Pedernal"
  • "Bird Meets Wire"
  • "From Union Pool"
  • "Manifesto"
  • "Canto"
  • "Thollem / Susan Alcorn - Thollem's Astral Traveling Sessions"
  • "Filament"
  • "In-Yun"