David Rosenboom
David Rosenboom
David Rosenboom is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator, known as a pioneer in American experimental music. He has explored ideas in his work about the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art, computer music systems, interactive multi-media, compositional algorithms and extended musical interface with the human nervous system since the 1960's. Rosenboom is currently Co-Acting President of California Institute of the Arts where he has worked since 1990. He also holds the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music, is Dean of The Herb Alpert School of Music and board member of The Center for New Performance. He has been conductor of CalArts’ New Century Players and Co-Director of its Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990 where he was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music, and held of the Darius Milhaud Chair. He studied at the University of Illinois, where he was later awarded the George A. Miller Professorship as a visiting artist, and has held positions in the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, York University in Toronto, where he was a professor of music and interdisciplinary studies, Bard College, Simon Fraser University, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale, and Ionian University in Greece. His work has been presented in many venues around the world, widely published, and recorded on a variety of labels.
More information is available at:
http://adagio.calarts.edu/~david
Rain Coloring Forest (2010) live electronic music for the dance and live painting performance by Sardono Kusumo.
AH! (2009) opera no-opera; opera generator, template for endless operas; created in collaboration with writer, Martine Bellen.
Kicking Shadows (2007) for solo piano with improvisational components, may also be arranged or orchestrated, links rhythm and blues inspirations with Zen-soul and forms of gradual processes, refers to Chi-fo (a.k.a. Feng-seng), in memory James Brown
Tango Secretum (2006) for solo piano with improvisational components, may also be arranged or orchestrated, refers to the poem, Secretum, by Martine Bellen, which in turn refers to Secretum by Francesco Petrarca.
Twilight Language (2004) for solo piano, a score in four musical configuration spaces with vistuosic materials, a Twilight Language (Theme), and symbols for surrounding sound space images to be developed and ordered by the performer; titles of the four configuration spaces give seed foci for musical meditations: I—Devotion and Restless Heart Indistinguishable, II—Simultaneous Absence of Silence and Sound, III—Leaping from Eye of Wildest Imagination, and IV—Imperishable Jewel of Adamantine Mind; refers to double meanings in Sandhyabhasa(Sanskrit), symbolic idiom of the mystical Siddhas of Tibet, the Tenth Century, Ch’an (Zen), Chinese painter, Shih K’o, a drawing by Lindsay Claire Rosenboom, and the canonical proportions of Tibetan Buddha figures
Zones of Coherence (2003) for solo or multiple trumpets, a score in four large, circular panels comprising musical configuration spaces, each with musical materials that may be ordered in a variety of ways to create the individual time-space realizations of particular performances, includes extended techniques, proportional tuning and time structures, and characteristic, virtuosic trumpet materials; the four parts employ Bb trumpet, Bb cornet, trumpet, or flugelhorn, Bb piccolo trumpet, and C trumpet respectively.
Naked Curvature (Four Memories of the Daimon) (2001) for instrumental sextet (flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano/Midi keyboard, and percussion/Midi mallet instrument), whispering voices, four sound effect textures, and interactive computer software; score has modular sections which may be used to construct various performances; a symbolic concerto grosso and whispered chamber opera referring to particular mystical writings of William Butler Yeats and others.
From the very beginning of my musical life, my interest in composition has been guided by intense wonderment that musical activity can admit an enormous range of investigations into human consciousness and knowledge. In music one can unfold the dynamics of human relationships and culture, investigate perception, represent philosophical systems, express emotions, embody systems of metaphor and cognition, symbolize dramas of history and evolution, and enact real models of nature and the cosmos.
I love encountering forms that dynamically emerge and offer opportunities for audiences to become interactively immersed in their evolutionary trajectories. Enfolding aesthetic, philosophical, and artistic notions inside unfolding, somewhat unpredictable processes, with both visceral and intellectual results, that's part of the goal.
During recent epochs, the propositional models embodied in music composition evolved at an accelerating pace and split into a plethora of developmental tributaries, which only occasionally merged into illusory, temporary mainstreams. For the adventuresome at heart this is precisely what makes ours an exciting, exhilarating musical epoch in which to live, one that can brightly illuminate the makeup of the collective human intellect, body, and spirit.
