Phil's Bio
COMPOSITION, IMPROVISATION, ELECTRONICS
As a composer I am an explorer of sounds. I work with the sounds of instruments and voices to craft a story of the tones. My motto: no sonic prejudice. I explore this idea in all my music offerings. As you can see from my resume I am interested in many genres, including free improvisation, orchestral music, vocal music, solo, and chamber music. I compose both formal, and solo improvisation works; dividing my composing equally between these forms. The main difference for me between solo improvised compositions and written composition is reflection. In my written works, I spend a lot of time crafting and pruning the details. I aim for an emotional effect in my music, not purity of formal processes.
For me there are two kinds of improvisation: 1) collaboration with others which is a shared experience of reacting to others to make the form, and 2) solo improvisation which is composing in the moment. I do some collaborative performing, but my main interest is in solo improvisation. In that work I go directly to the composition impulse. Over the last decade I have performed all over the United States improvising with solo bass and real time analog electronics. This includes programming voltage control, additive, and FM synths. I also have experience with software simulations of analog machines. My training includes analog tape effects as well as splicing. I am familiar with and have used most commercial music creation products including Garage Bank Reason, Audacity, Sibelius. Mastery of these building blocks are important, but not as important as the imagination necessary to extend the properties of these devices. My interest in analog stems from my point of view as the performer/composer creating live in real time. I am very adept at computers so it would be easy for me to expand my electronic focus for what is required.
MY EDUCATION UNDERGIRDS MY PHILOSPHY
Free Jazz was my first voice, before I studied theory or composition I was creating in this style. In my early 20’s I worked with the New York City Artists’ Collective. Our Collective was expansive in the ideas influenced by Free Jazz, and 60’s Rock and Roll. When I left the group to start school, I had already spent several years immersed in sonic play with no rules. For my undergraduate degree, I studied string bass at Queens’ College in New York. There I took composition classes with Henry Weinberg. I went on to pursue a Masters in Composition at Queens, where I was very attracted to dissonant music of the post tonal world. Taking that influence, my work developed an experimental edge. I chose my Ph. D. program at the University of Chicago, primarily to work with Ralph Shapey who was a post Varese and Stravinsky composer, and important to me because of his free form concepts. There I developed more ideas using a different set of rules for every piece.