dan tramte
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UGA

It is my pleasure to send you the requested additional materials:

1. Three contrasting & representative scores/recordings

• degradative interference for table-top electric guitar, vine videos, object, & pedals; performed by Nico Couck
--score
--recording
• i/o for glissando headjoint flute, percussion, & piano; performed by the InterSpheres Trio
--score
--recording
• G®¡ND for saxophone, percussion, & electronics
--score
--recording
​
if you have time, I highly recommend that you also look at one of my recent works, Helmut & Teddy Coming Down After a Rave (score) as well as my video installation, Granulation by Stop Motion—both of which you may view on my page,
#composition

2. List of Works

​• I have extracted the pages of my CV that contain my list of works, and you may view that ::here::

3. Sample Course Materials

• For the past three years, I have served as a teaching fellow at Harvard University, teaching analytical courses in music theory. During this past year, I served as "head teaching fellow" for preceptors, Richard Beaudoin, and Chelsea Burns.
—I encourage you to view my lecture on chromatic sequences: ::lecture::
—Here is a syllabus of one of those courses:
 ::syllabus::
—Prior to teaching at Harvard, I was an instructor of record at the University of North Texas, where I taught Introduction to Music Technology for two years. Here is a syllabus that I made for that course ::syllabus::


4. Response to question

Musicians in the twenty-first century must be able to make sense of an increasingly diverse, sometimes noisy musical culture. As the simultaneous presence of the array of disparate sounds in our globalized community suggests, musicians should feel empowered to seek out, comprehend, and create any kind of music that they encounter or imagine.

For an introductory composition course, this means familiarizing young composers with the vast repertoire of new music. Students tend to compose based on what they know – often what they have heard in concert halls and what they have been taught in their music theory classes. Thus it is important for students to expand what they know, as it helps them to establish an informed compositional identity.
I have personally built the largest legal Score+Recording library on the net in the form of three youtube channels: Score Follower, Incipitsify, and Mediated Scores, and I am confident that my knowledge of contemporary repertoire and my ability to point students to works that target potential notational/aesthetic/ technical issues make me uniquely qualified to address these concerns in the classroom.

It is not enough, however, to be well versed in repertoire and contemporary techniques. I regard composition as a process in which students get their fingernails dirty, experiment with sound-making objects, and take on an endless pursuit of discovery. In my composition course, I would love to put into practice my compositional methodology “
Design | Tab | Interpret.” DESIGN: At the beginning of the semester, students design non-standard instruments (modded gameboys, deconstructed saxophones, power tools, toys, etc.), then formulate a “performance practice” with the instrument through experimentation, collaboration, and improvisation. TAB: The students then devise a way to communicate these non-standardized sounds using non-standardized notation to other musicians who will INTERPRET: i.e., perform the works at the end of the semester.

Say a student chooses a balloon as their instrument. It will be up to the student to decide how to hold and manipulate the balloon in such a way that they can consistently achieve the rich variety of sounds that the balloon has to offer. The balloon, however, poses a fascinating problem: we do not have a standardized notation for the balloon, and no, you cannot just write a B-flat and expect other performers to be able to hit a B-flat by rubbing their finger across the instrument at the perfect speed. It is at this point that we must evaluate all of the physical and mechanical interactions between the body and the instrument, and find a symbolic means of representing and transmitting that information so that musicians can indeed interpret the student's ideas.


I believe it is vitally important for students to become familiar with what has been done in composition. This knowledge, however, has the potential to limit students to composing in styles that already exist, and thus I find that supplementing it with focused creative activities that encourage students to experiment and discover new sounds makes for a fruitful and enjoyable experience in composition. 


5. Course Proposal

• I have drafted a syllabus for a course called Music in Digital Culture, an elective open to any and all musicians ::syllabus::

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