Since I was a small child, I have been interested in the ordering of tones and sounds. My teachers have included Lewis Nielson, who is at Oberlin now, and Christopher Theofanidis, who teaches at the Peabody Institute, among others. I've become fascinated with processes of directed listening, where the composer intentionally leads or obfuscate's the audience's awareness of what happens in the music. I am fond of multiple layers of form that move at different rates or in separating directions. I've written for orchestra, chamber groups, and soloists, with and without prerecorded sounds or live computer processing.
In my other life, I am an improvisor exploring bizarre clarinet techniques, learning much from the many performers who come through Baltimore. I also improvise with homemade digital instruments in Pure Data. I regularly perform with three Baltimore free music troupes, Death in the Maze (an extended technique reed trio with a drummer), Suitcase (a computer music improvisation trio), and Geodesic Gnome (an indescribable mess of post-music misanthropes guided by an undermining compositional madman, John Berndt). I help maintain an experimental music (sometimes dance, film, or food) concert series at the Red Room and assist in running a yearly festival dedicated to out music at High Zero. I'm also starting up a quarterly series called After Now for the constant debut of new works by Maryland composers. Our first show will be at the Red Room on July 21, 2007.
Among my favorite accomplishments is helping John Berndt realize an auditory vision(?) he has held for years. I developed an automated control system for a feedback installation that we built together. Our Speakeroids project resided in Baltimore's Contemporary Gallery during High Zero 2004. His idea was a complicated network of resonant bodies (springs, drums, metal) who's signals we could individually route from one instrument to another. My software automated semi-random patches between instruments creating feedback loops. The instruments were created with modified speakers designed to excite the bodies rather than produce sound. Each instrument had its own piezo microphone. We were able to capture the resonance of one instrument being excited by the sound of another body and send the vibrations into a third resonator. Our project continues with more elaborate software allowing finer control of inputs and outputs or alternative methods of exciting the speakeroids.
