Kevin Salfen

Kevin Salfen (Professor of Music, University of the Incarnate Word) is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and producer. Major research interests include twentieth-century British music and Japanese music in film and theater. Salfen has written a music appreciation e-textbook, Pathways to Music (Kendall-Hunt, 2^nd ed., 2018), and his writing on Benjamin Britten has appeared in multiple academic journals and essay collections. He has presented papers at numerous academic conferences, including the national meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society of Ethnomusicology, and he is currently President of the American Musicological Society, Southwest Chapter. He curates and writes for the blog Sound Trove.

Salfen lived in Japan for almost two years, and he is a Company Member of international performing ensemble Theatre Nohgaku. With them he has performed traditional noh and newly written (shinsaku) noh. Salfen was executive producer of the multi-year performance and education project Where Rivers Meet, which brought together the classical noh Sumida River, Britten’s Curlew River, and the newly commissioned Song of the Yanaguana River by 2015 Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla.

Salfen’s music has been performed in Asia, Europe, and throughout the U.S. He was a finalist for the ASCAP Young Composer Award, was nominated for the 2019 Artist Foundation of San Antonio People’s Choice Award, has been recognized twice for his music by the American College Theater Festival, and in 2022 was named a Finalist in the Vocal/Instrumental Chamber Music category of The American Prize for his song cycle Stations of Mychal. Salfen was executive producer for two film projects: Made in SA: New Performers, New Musicians (2020) and SA24: Two Dozen Songs from Now (2021), and his intercultural work Phoenix Fire, now a film in post-production, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.