New York, NY
Born 1956 Miami Beach, Florida
I write music to challenge and entertain myself. I imagine things that either don't exist or that I can't figure out, and then try to do them. I add dimensionality to the concert experience by collaborating with visual and theater artists. One of my recent works includes Decasia in which I de-tuned an entire Symphony Orchestra to sound like a piano that has fallen out of someone's apartment window. The orchestra sits on a three-tiered pyramid with the audience inside, surrounded by Bill Morrison's celluloid distressed film and spectacles by Ridge Theater.
B.A., New York University
1986 M.M., Yale University
1987 Co-founder and Co-artistic director with composers David Lang and Julia Wolfe, Bang on a Can Festival, responsible for presenting hundreds of new and unknown contemporary music works.
2004 Gotham, collaboration with Ridge Theater, premiered by American Composers Orchestra.
2004 What To Wear, with text and direction by Richard Foreman, REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles.
2003 Light Is Calling, recorded on Nonesuch CD.
2001 Decasia for orchestra, collaboration with Ridge Theater, films by Bill Morrison and projections by Laurie Olinder; premiere by Basel Sinfonietta, Kasper De Roo, conductor, Europaischer Musikmonat, Basel, Switzerland; recorded on Cantaloupe 21008, CD.
1997 Weather for string orchestra, video by Elliot Caplan; premiere by Bonn Oper Ensemble Resonanz, Bonn, Germany; recorded on Nonesuch 79553-2, CD.
1996 Chaos, opera with libretto by Matthew Maguire and direction by Bob McGrath; premiere at The Kitchen, New York, 1998.
1999 Academy Award in Music, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
1999 (co-recipient), Obie Award for The Carbon Copy Building, collaboration with composers David Lang and Julia Wolfe, comic-strip artist Ben Katchor, and Bob McGrath, Artistic Director, Ridge Theater.
