While Young still maintains a love for the ocean, she devotes her professional life to music. Her compositions and audiovisual projects draw from Eastern European folk music, the early Renaissance, and modern music. In 2019, Carnegie Hall commissioned her piece Out of whose womb came the ice, which explores the history of Ernest Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition. “For me, it’s interesting to create a fantastical environment in which I can make a sound world,” she says.
Next, she’ll work on a piece for the Boston-based quartet Hub New Music, setting the voice recordings of poet Rosie Stockton to music. She’s also working on The Glow that Illuminates, The Glare that Obscures for the American Brass Quintet. The music is paired with a 50-minute immersive audiovisual installation using wave field synthesis, which create 3D audio holograms.
Much like the water, “art provides an escape or a vision of some other space,” Young says. “I think it’s really important for our health and psyche to know that you can create other realms.”