Writing a bio

Charles Celeste Hutchins was born in 1976 and things went downhill from there. However, despite this, in 1989, he won his school’s raffle. He has not won a prize since.

He is one of the lucky few men to have completed an undergraduate degree at Mills College, where he studied composition with Maggi Payne. He graduated in 1998 and then, predictably, got caught up in the dot com boom. When that ended, he followed the path of most young people unsure of what to do next and went to grad school. He studied at Wesleyan University, working most closely on computer music with Ron Kuivila, and also studied improvisation with Anthony Braxton. They recorded an album together in 2005 which is still awaiting release.

After his 2005 graduation, he went to France to study at CCMIX, a musical center founded by Xenakis, who was no longer teaching there, having died some years previous. After that, he went to the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands and took the year long Sonology course.

In 2007, he moved to England and began studying at the University of Birmingham, which awarded him a PhD in 2012. There, he studied with Scott Wilson. Also while a student, he was the instigator of BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble – his colleagues claim he pressured them to sign up while drunk, but he has no memory of this. He also co-organised the Network Music Festival in 2012 and 2013, which is due to return in in 2014. It was while at Birmingham that he took the first name Charles, in honor of his recently deceased uncle Chuck Forge, and, of course, Charles Amirkhanian.

Since graduating, Charles has again followed a predictable path, working as an adjunct professor. He has taught at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and now is teaching at the University of Kent.

During the nomadic wanderings of his last decade, he has played gigs in Europe and the US and also gotten some radio play in both places. He is relatively well-known to the users of SuperCollider both for his compositions and his contributions to the language’s libraries, although not so well known that people always get his name right when he comes up in discussion.

His current projects involve work with BiLE in making pieces that musically engage digital surveillance and writing computer-generated graphic notation in a piece for the Vocal Constructivists, a London-based choir.