ALVIN LUCIER is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations. He is the author of Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music and coauthor, with Douglas Simon, of Chambers. Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music and received an honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England. He taught at Brandeis University and Wesleyan University, and retired from the latter in 2011.
MARYANNE AMACHER was born on February 25, 1939, in Kane, Pennsylvania. She studied with the composer George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania, and later privately with the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Amacher was known for large-scale, site-specific sound installations that explore the propagation of sound in architectural spaces. Her work often focused on psychoacoustic phenomena in which sound is generated from within the ear. Amacher collaborated extensively with John Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 1998 she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award as well as the Prix Ars Electronica Award in the “digital arts” category. In the last decade of her life, Maryanne Amacher taught electronic music at Bard College. She died on October 22, 2009, in Rhinebeck, New York.
ROBERT ASHLEY was born on March 28, 1930, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was educated at the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music, following which he returned to the study of psychoacoustics and speech patterns at the University of Michigan Speech Research Laboratory. He rose to prominence in the 1960s as a founder and organizer of the ONCE Group and was a member of the Sonic Arts Union, a collective of experimental composers that included David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier. Throughout his life Ashley was fascinated by the musical nature of speech. Perfect Lives, the first of over thirty operas for television, was premiered on British television in 1984 and has since been broadcast throughout the world. His final opera, Crash, premiered after his death at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Ashley died in New York that same year.
PHILIP GLASS was born on January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the University of Chicago, and the Julliard School before moving to Paris to study with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. There he met Ravi Shankar, from whom he developed an interest in Indian classical music. Much of his music, particularly the early works, is characterized by his use of the incessant repetition of rhythmic and melodic patterns creating mesmerizing and trancelike compositions. In 1968, he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, a group with which he continues to perform. His opera Einstein on the Beach, on which he collaborated with Robert Wilson, earned him international acclaim in 1976 and continues to be performed today at venues around the world. Philip Glass is one of the most prolific composers in the world today, having produced eleven symphonies, eighteen operas, thirty-eight film scores, and seven string quartets, as well as numerous solo pieces and works for theater and dance. Philip Glass has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Alan Ginsburg, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, David Bowie, and Martin Scorsese, and has been awarded three Academy Award Nominations.
MEREDITH MONK, born November 20, 1942, is a composer, theater director, vocalist, filmmaker, choreographer, and early pioneer of performance art. Her vocalizations are legendary, incorporating a wide variety of extended techniques that reach beyond language. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1964, Monk went on to win many awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1968, Monk founded the House, a company dedicated to exploring concepts of interdisciplinary performance. In 1978 she formed the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble and recorded several highly successful albums, including her first widely celebrated Songs from the Hill/Tablet in 1979. Atlas, an Opera in Three Parts, was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in February 1991. Meredith Monk continues to compose numerous works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, with commissions from Carnegie Hall, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, the Kronos Quartet, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, among others.
STEVE REICH was born on October 3, 1936, in New York City. He graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell in 1957. For the next two years he studied composition with Hal Overton, and from 1958 to 1961, he studied with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at the Julliard School of Music. He received an MA in music from Mills College in 1963, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. Reich’s discovery and use of phasing and other innovative techniques has helped him earn a place as one of the greatest living composers. He has had a significant impact on contemporary music, influencing artists from Brian Eno to Radiohead. He was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Double Sextet. The same year he received multiple Grammy awards for his Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains. Steve Reich was awarded the Gold Medal in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received honorary doctorates from the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and the New England Conservatory of Music.
JAMES TENNEY was born on August 10, 1934, in Silver City, New Mexico. He was a highly regarded pianist, composer, and music theorist. A pioneer in computer music as well as an important character in the Fluxus artist movement, Tenney is known for his conceptually driven and computer-aided compositions. He studied composition under many influential composers, including Edgard Varèse and John Cage. He was the co-founder and conductor of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble and has performed alongside Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Cage. He taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the California Institute for the Arts, the University of California, and York University. James Tenney died on August 24, 2006, in Valencia, California.
CHRISTIAN WOLFF was born on March 8, 1934, in Nice, France. He moved with his family to the United States in 1941, where he studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition with John Cage. The youngest member of the New York School of composers, which included Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman, Wolff continues to write numerous works for unlikely combinations of disparate or indeterminate instrumentation, many of which use political texts. He studied classics at Harvard University and later went on to become the Strauss Professor of Music and Classics at Dartmouth College. Wolff’s honors and awards include honorary degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and Huddersfield University in the United Kingdom, as well as a DAAD Berlin fellowship and a lifetime achievement award from the state of Vermont.
LA MONTE YOUNG was born in a log cabin in Bern, Idaho, on October 14, 1935. He attended Los Angeles City College and, in 1958, received a BA from UCLA. From 1958 to 1960 he did graduate work at Berkeley with composer Seymour Shifrin, at which time he composed Trio for Strings, a work whose use of extremely long tones was the precursor to the subsequent development of the minimalist aesthetic and drone music. In the summer of 1959 he traveled to Darmstadt, where he met David Tudor, who introduced him to the music and writings of John Cage. He moved to New York City in 1960 to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield at the New School for Social Research. In 1970 he developed an interest in North Indian classical music and began studying under the Hindustani vocal master Pandit Pran Nath. His five-and-a-half-hour work The Well-Tuned Piano, which Young himself regards as his masterpiece, is the definitive example of the use of just intonation in experimental music. In 2002, Young, along with Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi, founded the Just Alap Raga Ensemble, a Hindustani classical music ensemble based in New York City.