Brooklyn, New York
Born 1960, Baltimore, Maryland
Composer, Sound Artist
What I am pursuing are things I can't imagine; discovering and charting a territory of the extra-imaginary. Concurrently I am fascinated by the potential for making shapes out of sounds, using multiple speaker arrays. I may start with a sculptural storyboard that leads the composition by the requirements of its sonic holography. Or I may look inward at a cumulative event, like a rain shower or wind in the trees. I dissect it one drop, or one leaf at a time, to discover a hyperreal lens for the world. I am interested in how auditory focus reorganizes sound. So, for example, I take hundreds of recordings of some simple action and pile them up until an instant of transformation arrives, wherein the literal dissolves and a new identity is raised. It is the reverse of a Chuck Close painting: Chuck paints hundreds of abstract squares that together make a figurative portrait. I take hundreds of literal recordings and put them together to make an abstract gesture.
1991 Ph.D., Music Composition, Princeton University
1982 B.A., Music Composition, Bard College
2001-2002 Sound Arts Department Chairman, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
2005 (pages of illustrations), Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY Icebreaker, London Musician's Collective CD, Sound Art Supplement
2004 Music for 50 Carpenters, The Makor Theater, New York, NY
2003 Our Words became Parts of the Landscape, Diapason Gallery, New York, NY
2003 The Fact That it Goes Up (for choreographer Jeremy Nelson), Saddler's Wells, London, England
2002 Projekt Guernica (with composer Guy Yarden), Dansescene, Copenhagen, Denmark
2002 The Nature of the 102nd Thing of 10,000, Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Seoul, Korea
1999 an ear for a leg, Zoar CD (with Jim Coleman, David Linton, Zeena Parkins, Leslie Ross, Lauren Weinger and Guy Yarden)
2007 Artist in Residence, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD)
2005 Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Program Award
1999 Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust Recording Program Grant
1998 New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie")
