Download Composer Biographies

Composer Biographies
Christopher Adler is a composer, performer and improviser living in San Diego,
California. His compositions encompass cross-culturally hybrid forms drawn from
contemporary concert music and traditional musics of Thailand and Laos, the application
of mathematics to composition, and the integration of improvisation into structured
composition. He is a foremost performer of traditional and new music for the khaen, a
free-reed mouth organ from Laos and Northeast Thailand. He is the pianist and
composer-in-residence for the ensemble NOISE, the composer-in-residence of the niefnorf Summer Festival, and he co-organized the soundON Festival of Modern Music for
six years. He studied with Scott Lindroth, Evan Ziporyn, Steven Jaffe and Sidney Corbett
and is currently Professor of Music at the University of San Diego. His work may be
heard on Tzadik, Innova, pfMENTUM, Nine Winds Records, Artship Recordings,
Vienna Modern Masters, Circumvention, Accretions, and WGBH's Art of the States.
www.christopheradler.com
Christopher Burns is a composer, improviser, and multimedia artist. His instrumental
chamber works weave energetic gestures into densely layered surfaces. Polyphony and
multiplicity also feature in his electroacoustic music, embodied in gritty, rough-hewn
textures. As an improviser, Christopher combines an idiosyncratic approach to the
electric guitar with a wide variety of custom software instruments. Recent projects
emphasize multimedia and motion capture, integrating performance, sound, and
animation into a unified experience. Across all of these disciplines, his work emphasizes
trajectory and directionality, superimposing and intercutting a variety of evolving
processes to create form. Both electronic and acoustic music are influenced by
Christopher's work as a music technology researcher. His improvisation software designs
incorporate a variety of unusual user interfaces for musical performance, and explore the
application and control of feedback for complex and unpredictable sonic behavior. In the
instrumental domain, he uses algorithmic procedures to create distinctive pitch and
rhythmic structures and elaborate them through time. Christopher is also an avid
archaeologist of electroacoustic music, creating and performing new digital realizations
of classic music by composers including John Cage, György Ligeti, Alvin Lucier, Conlon
Nancarrow, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has studied composition with
Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Berger, Michael Tenzer, and Jan
Radzynski.
Mexican composer, pianist, intellectual, editor, and teacher, Mario Lavista is regarded as
a central figure in the contemporary music scene of his native country Mexico. A prolific
composer of orchestral, stage, chamber, solo, and electronic pieces, his oeuvre is
characterized by its intersections with the other arts. His music shows an integration of
modernist avant-garde trends of both European and American music, while adopting
compositional techniques of diverse historical periods of Western art traditions. He has
maintained an active performance career, especially in collective improvisations using
prepared piano.
Lavista’s role as intellectual has been shaped mainly through the series of lecture-recitals
he regularly organizes as member of El Colegio Nacional—a prestigious governmentfunded institution intended to foster cultural and intellectual activities of an intellectual
elite. Moreover, he is founder and director of one of the most renowned music journals in
Mexico, Pauta: Cuadernos de Teoría y Crítica Musical, which promotes multidisciplinary
dialogues, especially among writers, painters and musicians, and has a strong emphasis
on contemporary music. Lavista has been teaching at the Conservatorio Nacional since
1970, where his role as educator and mentor has been particularly relevant for
“practically all Mexican composers that are younger than he is,” according to Luis Jaime
Cortez.
Matthew Burtner is an Alaskan-born composer, sound artist and technologist
specializing in concert chamber music and interactive new media. His work explores
ecoacoustics, embodiment, and extended polymetric and noise-based systems. First Prize
Winner of the Musica Nova International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Czech
Republic), a 2011 IDEA Award Winner, and a recipient of the Howard Brown
Foundation Fellowship, Burtner’s music has also received honors and awards from
Bourges (France), Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Darmstadt (Germany) and Luigi Russolo
(Italy) international competitions. He is Associate Professor of Composition and
Computer Technologies in the Department of Music at the University of Virginia where
he Directs the Interactive Media Research Group (IMRG) and Associate Directs the
VCCM Computer Music Center. Burtner’s music has been performed in major festivals
and venues throughout the world, and commissioned by ensembles such as Integrales
(Germany), NOISE (USA), Trio Ascolto (Germany), MiN (Norway), Musikene (Spain),
Spiza (Greece), CrossSound (Alaska), and others. He has also had the opportunity to
work closely with virtuosic soloists such as Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Dimitris Marinos,
Morris Palter, Haleh Abghari, Lukas Ligeti, Michael Straus, Madeleine Shapiro and Wu
Wei. As a technologist, Burtner develops systems for human-computer-environment
interaction featured in his music. He invented the NOMADS telematic system, the MICE
human-computer ensemble and orchestra, the Metasaxophone augmented instrument, and
a number of ecoacoustic approaches.
Adam Greene is a composer of instrumental works intended to re-explore the nature of
engagement between composer and performer. His compositions have been
commissioned and presented by performers and institutions committed to the promotion
of new and innovative musical experiences, including SONOR, Ensemble Resonanz, the
Formalist Quartet, János Négyesy, and Speculum Musicae. His collaborations with
adventurous and generous soloists have been vital in forging an approach towards the
musical score that places extreme physical and technical demands in a meaningful
dramatic and expressive context.
While several of his compositions are extended from concepts where no particular text
exists, many works have emerged from an encounter with writings, such as those by
Calvino, Beckett, Joyce, and Lewis Carroll. His orchestral work In Winter takes as a
point of departure a haiku from Basho. Recently he has been engrossed in Classical texts,
which have formed the basis for several ongoing projects. An occasional poet, his own
words have found their way into musical projects as well, often as a means of offering an
alternate, poetic commentary to musical figures that simultaneously aids and complicates
the performer’s interpretation.
Adam Greene’s music has been performed throughout the United States as well as in
Europe and Asia. He has participated in several festivals and residency programs that
have featured his works, such as UCROSS, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the
International Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt), the Composers Conference at
Wellesley, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (at the New
England Conservatory of Music), and the Long Beach Summer Arts program. As a
student of Franco Donatoni in the mid-1990’s he was enrolled in courses in composition
and contemporary music at the Civica Scuola, Milan. His awards include a commission
grant from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, as well as prizes from ASCAP,
American Composers Forum, and NACUSA. Recordings of his music can be found on
Aucourant Records.
Born in Athens, Greece in May 1978, Nicolas Tzortzis has been living in Paris, France,
since 2002. He studied instrumental and electronic composition with Philippe Leroux at
the CRD de Blanc Mesnil, musical theatre composition with Georges Aperghis at the
Hochschule der Kunste in Bern, Switzerland and Computer Aided Composition at the
University of Paris 8 under the direction of Horacio Vaggione and José Manuel LopezLopez. In 2009-2010 he attended the CURSUS 1 of composition and computer music at
the IRCAM and he has been selected to do the CURSUS 2 for the years 2010-2012,
where he presented a large-scale work for silent piano and live electronics. He is
currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Montreal, under the supervision of Philippe
Leroux and Denis Gougeon. He has taken part in master classes with Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Brian Ferneyhough, Beat Furrer and François Paris, as well as computer
music seminars at the IRCAM. In 2010, he was selected for the 6th New Composers
Forum of the Ensemble Aleph. His music has been performed in France, Greece,
Bulgaria, Slovenia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain, the Netherlands,
the USA, Canada, Argentina, Peru, South Korea and Australia, and has been selected and
awarded in competitions worldwide (USA, South Korea, Germany, France, Austria,
Greece, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Argentina).
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Supplied by Lisa Cella, June 12, 2014.