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| Bio: | |
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I was born in 1983 and started composing when I was 11, on a family trip to Italy. My earliest interest was Bach, and after that, Hindemith, Prokofiev and Bartók. When I was 15 I discovered rock (by means of "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I Am The Walrus"), and when I was 17 I discovered the experimental rock underground (by means of The Olivia Tremor Control, Kukl, Mr. Bungle and Thinking Plague). Those two discoveries got me interested in combining ideas from the scored-music world and ideas from the rock world, and since then I've been exploring various ways of bringing disparate materials together -- not just rock and scored music, but really anything. I got my BA at Yale in 2005, and my MA at the University of Michigan in 2007. I've also had some experience creating music outside of the world of scored music, including: releasing two albums of electronic music on my now-closed microlabel, Electric Walrus Records, in 2003 and 2004; doing a noise-rock set at the Sarah Lawrence College Noise and Experimental Music Festival in 2004; and playing keyboards in an experimental bossa-nova band called Plecostomus in 2006. I currently live in New York City. New things are on the horizon; you'll read about them soon on the news page.
For more detailed information, see my CV.
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| Artistic statement: | |
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I used to spend a lot of time thinking about musical languages: ways to combine them, ways to subvert them, and so on. I called my music "polystylistic." These days I don't care so much about those issues. I've started thinking of my music as "post-stylistic." The term is a little too academic-sounding for what essentially amounts to "writing the music I feel like writing," but if you need an "-ism," it'll do. Three principles I believe in very strongly: 1. Aesthetic egalitarianism. There aren't too many composers left in America who still subscribe to the old modernist prohibitions -- no tonal harmonies, no pop-culture influences, no repetition, no octaves. But there are plenty who are still, decades after the old guard's fall from power, reacting so strongly against it that they've become equally closed-minded, except in the opposite direction. ("I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left." -Woody Allen) Don't get sucked into this mindset: it is possible to like both Reich and Ferneyhough, both Adams and Lachenmann! A conversation about them isn't required to dissolve into politicized name-calling, with one side calling the other pompous elitists and the other side calling the first side pandering sell-outs. WE ALL LOVE MUSIC. CAN'T WE ALL BE FRIENDS? 2. No guilty pleasures. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say that they like something but they're embarrassed to admit it, or that they like something "ironically" because it's so bad (and you can tell that they just plain like it). All of this amounts to the same thing: denying or downplaying your actual taste because you like something that's not cool enough for the hipster crowd, or not serious enough for the Western-canon crowd. Like closed-mindedness about style, this attitude just makes the music world a poorer place. Let me lead by example: I love Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl," "Bubble Pop Electric," "What You Waiting For?" and "Harajuku Girls." I think they're very well-constructed, catchy, surprising, original, fun, imaginative, beautifully produced, slightly disturbing and inexplicably moving. And I REALLY MEAN IT. ("Irony is the last refuge of the weak-willed and cowardly." -David Thomas)
3. Questions, not answers. Craft is important, but, for me at least, what makes a work of art stick is not how technically accomplished it is. It's something less easily talked about, and the best way I've found to express it is to say that it asks questions as well as giving answers. Many pieces of music are very clear about what they're doing, and they don't deviate from their path or leave any room for ambiguous feelings. When you've heard them, you may feel satisfied, but there's nothing left to reflect on, and with time, that satisfaction often turns to disappointment. ("When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down." -David Lynch) But sometimes a piece will have a moment or two where something is mysterious or uncertain or somehow "off," and you think, "Wait a minute. Did I hear that right? Is that possible?" And after the piece is over, you know you'll want to listen again, because there's something that's still bugging you. For me, those moments are where the spiritual quality of music is located. (I could say the same thing about any art that takes place over time: film, literature, dance, etc.)
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| Influences: | |
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Living composers: Louis Andriessen, Steve Mackey, Frederic Rzewski, Salvatore Sciarrino, Steve Reich, Scott Johnson, Robert Ashley, Gérard Pesson, Judy Bozone, Timothy Andres, Evan Ziporyn, Jacob ter Veldhuis Dead composers: Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sergei Prokofiev, Alfred Schnittke, Gustav Mahler, Francis Poulenc, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill Bands and recording artists: David Thomas, Oingo Boingo, Gentle Giant, Thinking Plague, 5uu's, Mr. Bungle, Shudder to Think, Laurie Anderson, News from Babel, Aksak Maboul, Antônio Carlos Jobim
Things that aren't music: David Lynch, The Firesign Theatre, Saskia Olde Wolbers.
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