Biography

-Fluid Radio 

A native of Boston, MA, Brenna Noonan began her studies at The Boston Conservatory. She later moved to France and studied with Jean-Denis Michat at the Conservatoire National Rayonnement de Lyon. After accepting a position as a teaching artist with the Santa Fe Concert Association, she re-located to Santa Fe, NM where she coached her students and ensembles to numerous regional awards. She received her BA in Contemporary Music with the distinction of summa cum laude  from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. She received her MA in Composition from Mills College. Upon completion of her MA, she was awarded the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for creative excellence. Her Master's thesis, Sibelius as Lament Singer, is available through UMI/ProQuest.

She has performed at such venues as Boston’s Jordan Hall, Lyon’s Opéra Nouvel, Santa Fe’s Lensic Theater, and inside Nancy Holt's sculpture "Up and Under" in Nokia, Finland. While in France, Noonan attended the Université Européenne de Saxophone in Gap. A proponent of new music, she has given premieres of dozens of new works. Noonan has also performed internationally alongside Claude Delangle, Dennis Shafer, ALEA III, the Harlem String Quartet, and the hip-hop group Public Enemy, among others. She has participated in several master classes including those led by Claude Delangle, Arno Bornkamp, the PRISM Quartet, and the Quatour Habanera. Her primary saxophone teachers have been Phillipp Stäudlin, Kenneth Radnofsky, Jean-Denis Michat, and Steve Adams.

As a composer,  Noonan has received commissions from ensembles such as the Mobius Trio, Transient Canvas, the Guerilla Composers Guild, The Living Earth Show, and saxophonist Peter Leung. She has participated in master classes with numerous composers including Robert Lemay, Nancy Zeltsman, Sam Solomon, Tristan Murail, and Hans Abrahamsen, as well as the Del Sol String Quartet, the QX String Quartet, the Zodiac Trio, and the Eclipse String Quartet. She created the score for Charlsee Eberly's film Relative, a selection for the Cinema du Monde Film Festival in Rouen, France. She has been an Artist-In-Residence at the Arteles Creative Center in Haukijärvi, Finland.  During her residency she helped form the international performance art collective Art On Demand. In 2014 she was commissioned by composer Nat Evans to participate in his mobile residency “The Tortoise and his Raincoat: Music for a Very Long Walk.” Her resultant work, “The Marvelous Structure of the Existing World,” was exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA as part of their “Summer Field Studies” show. In 2016, her fixed media piece "Jäävuori" was featured in Aldara Ortega's "Breaking Surface" exhibition in New York. Her works can be heard on Quakebasket, Holy Page, and Skellum Records. She has studied composition with Gary Lee Nelson, Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, and Wendy Reid.

Noonan has studied Javanese Gamelan under Jenny DeBouzek with an emphasis on the bonang. She also studied early music and Baroque recorder with Shira Kammen. She is a founding member of the tape-based punk project Stove. She was a panelist at the inaugural New Music Gathering in San Francisco, CA on the topics of new music education and gender equality in new music.