Les said, the better II

Portfolio for Calarts

Not yet in order

(Many of these are on Mp3.com if you want to give feedback on the order, or whatever)

• Airwaves #3 Composed in 2002 using a MOTM analog modular synthesize, a Midiverb II, and breathing.
• Breaking Waves Composed in 2001 using a MOTM analog synthesizer and AudioCatalyst software. This piece was created by recording white noise to disk and then converting the AIFF file to MP3 and back again multiple times, resulting in aliasing that becomes more noticable with each re-conversion. It was released by IBOL Records on Random Spheres of Influence in 2001.
• Virtual Memory Exerpt Composed in 2001 using Macintosh Virtual Memory with an AIFF header added, a Jomox AirBase drum machine and a Midiverb. Note: Only the first few minutes of Virtual Memory #1 will be included in the exerpt.
• Phase Composed in 2001 using a Future Retro 777 analog synthesizer. This piece was featured on the now-defunct Nonsequiter ezine.
• Choral No. 1 Composed in 2000 using a MOTM analog modular synthesizer. This piece was played on German radio in 2001.
• Drum Decay Composed in 2001 using Rebirth software and a custom Max application. This piece was composed using the type of feedback loop that Alvin Lucier used in I am Sitting in a Room. It has been featured in pirate and internet radio.
• Chaos Patch Maybe? If you have feedback about whether you think this is a good piece or not when compared to the other things on the list, I’d like ot hear it. Composed in 2001 using a MOTM analog modular synthesizer. This piece was composed using analog chaos, so three oscilators were patched together in an FM loop. Is that clear? the output of one oscilator was going into the FM input of the next, whose output was going into the FM input of the next one, whose output was being recorded and going into the FM input of the first one. This creates mathematical type chaos. Very unpredictable. It was recorded and mixed in one night while awaiting returns from the state of Florida during the last presidential election.Should I include that note? The whole Florida thing is what made me thing of trying something with chaos in the first place. anyway, the technioque for recording this is unusual and demonstrates some knowledge of very obscure analog techniques that nobody tends ot use or care about and anyway… i should go listen to this one right now. should I use Bitter Day instead? the original title of “Bitter Day” was “Danica’s Lament”
• (de)construction Composed in 1997 using a Moog analog modular synthesizer and field recordings. This was one of my first compositions, recorded while I was at Mills College. Most of the field recordings were recorded with a piezo microphone and processed using the Moog Fixed Filter Bank. This was my most popular piece on Mp3.com. Include that last note about popularity? People really like this one, but it’s very old. It worries me sometimes that I did my very best piece when I was just starting out. My theory is that it’s the Moog that makes people like it. Also, the sound of andra jumping on the bed came out really well in stereo. I should tell Andra that she was an anonymous mp3.com star.
• No No Nonette (Printed Score) Composed in 2002-3 in responce to a Call for Scores issued by Jack Straw Productions in Seattle (see attached sheet), for a MIDI-controlled toy piano nonette. This score was selected and will be featured in Jack Straw’s New Media Gallery in February – April 2003.

Wow, this makes me look kind of successful… weird.

Really, the very last revison of the Personal Statement

When I was in high school, I had to decide between pursuing a career in computer programming or in professional tuba playing. Tuba playing is a low-paid profession, so, on the economic advice of my tuba teacher, I chose computer science. This was a logical choice for me. I started programming in BASIC when I was 8 years old and had been programming ever since. I grew up in the middle of Silicon Valley. My great grandfather, grandfather, uncle and father were all engineers. When I was a child, I spent Saturdays with my dad while he worked at his startup.

I went to Mills College to study Computer Science, and I very quickly found myself gravitating toward the Center for Contemporary Music. I had some limited exposure to New Music before I went to college, thanks to an excellent community radio station, but was not aware of it other than casually listening to noise bands. What I learned at Mills changed everything I thought about sound and music creation. I studied electronic music with Maggi Payne. She taught synthesis techniques on a large Moog Modular Synthesizer. The sound and the possibilities for music making were incredible. I thought the Moog was fantastic. I loved making music with it and the approach to sound creation that went with it. I decided to double-major in Computer Science and Electronic Music.

After I graduated, I got a job at a startup company that made products related to �Cooperative Commerce.� I did web programming and worked on their server. The product I was working on helped people buy things. A user could say that they wanted to buy a size 16 men�s blue shirt and our server software would give the user information about every size 16 men�s blue shirt that it could find on the web. All of the results were generated in real-time, using Artificial Intelligence. The company was a bit chaotic. Periodically, the management would come by and tell everyone that we were just about to have an IPO, or get more funding, or be bought by someone, in the mean time, we just had to give up a few more evenings and weekends. I did not write any music at all while I worked there, because the schedule took over all of my time.

When someone I knew from a previous interview called me and asked if I wanted to go work at Netscape and have more free time and make more money, I accepted. I started out writing scripts in Perl for the Open Directory Project, the largest human-edited directory on the web. I was also the release engineer and made the directory data publicly available every week. I also informally wrote the Product Requirements Document for ChefMoz, a restaurant database.

The job was interesting and I had enough time to make music and the means to obtain equipment. I purchased a MOTM Modular synthesizer and started recording tape music and posting it to Mp3.com. Another Mp3.com artist had a small record label and released two songs of mine on a compilation disk. My goal was to have two careers simultaneously. I would be an engineer and a composer. It might have worked except that I was commuting 50 miles each way to work and it was starting to burn me out. I realized that music had become a hobby rather than an avocation, so I started looking for another job, closer to home. At the same time, management decided to move my team over to online music.

My boss suspected that I was going to quit and asked me to stay on to write the Product Requirements Document for AOL�s online music service, a marketing job. I accepted and soon learned that I am not at all suited to marketing. My job was to write hundreds of pages of documents that nobody read and to go to meetings. At the same time, AOL had at least one other team on the East Coast working on the same project and Time Warner, whom AOL was purchasing, had several redundant teams. In 2001, I was laid off.

I instead of looking for a job right away, I decided to travel. I spent the summer in Europe. This was an important trip for me, because it allowed me to escape the culture of Silicon Valley and to look at a lot of art. I didn�t write any music while I was gone, but I visited several modern art museums, including the Venice Biennale. I also visited an online friend at ZKM, in Germany where she was writing a paper on mp3s. I was very impressed with the facilities there and the idea of music research.

When I came home, I had hundreds of musical ideas. The first was to switch career tracks to focus on composition. I wrote several pieces of tape music, and then I decided I wanted to write more music for live performance, so I organized a percussion group and wrote some music for them. The group performed some of my work at an art opening. I also did computer consulting. I wasn�t sure how to pull my work and aspirations together into a career.

At the same time, I started volunteering for Other Minds, a New Music nonprofit in San Francisco. I started as the driver for their festival. Shortly after that, they got possession of the KPFA music archives, featuring interviews with every important composer between 1969 and 1992. They are planning to use their library for a web radio project. I am helping them catalog their tape archive and pick out interesting tapes to submit for grant applications. I also worked for them as a volunteer sound engineer and produced or helped produce several CDs used for grant applications and I gave them technical advice regarding the web radio server hardware and software.

Last spring I attended the Composing a Career Conference sponsored by the Women’s Philharmonic. Almost everyone else there had a master’s degree and the presenters all assumed they were speaking to a master’s-level audience. Realizing that I needed more education, I started looking into graduate programs. I also started submitting tapes to festivals and calls for scores. One of my tapes was accepted at Woodstockhausen.

Unfortunately, shortly after the conference, while I was on my way to visit Jack Straw Productions in Seattle, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had surgery and started radiation treatment. All of my music work and consulting jobs were put on hold so I could spend time helping to take care of my mom. The treatment was not helpful and she died in the middle of October.

I spent several weeks after her death re-thinking my life plans. A few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to continue with my chosen track. I submitted a score to Jack Straw Productions for inclusion in a Trimpin instillation and they accepted it. I also started pulling together applications to the graduate schools that I picked out in the spring. Your program caught my interest because of your faculty [� talk about faculty.]

At [school] I hope to learn more about electronic music and also about composition for live performance. I would like to branch out into writing for live electronic performance, something that�s difficult to do with a modular synthesizer. I hope to learn more mediums for composition. I would also like to explore more writing for traditional instruments. [school] has a reputation for performance as well as composition and I hope to be able to work with some of the performers studying there.

After I graduate with a Masters degree, I hope to find success as a freelance composer. I am also interested in doing music research at a center like STEIM, IRCAM or ZKM, or a comparable center in the United States. I know that [school] could give me the skills and education necessary to achieve this goal. Your excellent reputation would also help my professional aspirations. I hope you consider me for your program.

Much more honest, but also darn darn long. I don’t have much time to change it anymore. If CalArts only wants half a paragraph, too bad. Suggestions, especially for cuts, welcome.

Statement of Purpose – bigger, better!

When I was in high school, I had to decide between pursuing a career in computer programming or in professional tuba playing. On the advice of my tuba teacher, I chose computer science. I went to Mills College to study Computer Science, but very quickly found myself gravitating to the Center for Contemporary Music. I studied electronic music with Maggi Payne. She taught synthesis techniques on a large Moog Modular Synthesizer. The sound and the possibilities for music making were incredible. I had some limited exposure to New Music before I went to college, thanks to an excellent community radio station, but was not aware of it other than casually listening to noise bands.

The music classes I took at Mills changed everything I thought about sound and music creation. Even though Mills is a liberal arts college, I took almost nothing but Computer Science classes and Music classes. At the end of my sophomore year, my advisor informed me that I had completed all of the classes required for my major and that I needed to either take all the rest of my classes outside of the Math and Computer Science department or transfer to a different school. I calculated how many units that I needed to graduate and how many additional music classes it would take to major in music and decided to double-major.

Taking all of the lower-division theory classes as an upper-division student was a little frustrating. I had previously taken a seminar on John Cage that was offered in conjunction with the John Cage conference that Mills hosted. The teacher told us then that we didn�t need to know music theory to be composers. Between that and the Moog I was fascinated and hooked, but then, as a major, the same teacher later explained to me that I did need to learn theory if I wanted to be a composer, at least at Mills.

After I graduated, I started a professional career in computer programming, the plan I chose for economic reasons. Economically, the plan worked out quite well and I was able to acquire a new modular synthesizer, and a nice computer with Pro-tools and some other music software on it. Otherwise, it did not work out as well as I hoped. Buying gear did not prevent music from being marginalized in my life. Despite my best efforts, it began to be a hobby rather than an avocation. Also, it was not long before I realized that studying computer science is interesting, but day-to-day programming is much less so. I had a hard time fitting in the culture of Silicon Valley. When I got laid off in 2001, instead of looking for a job right away, I decided to travel.

I spent the summer traveling in Europe. The first non-English speaking country I visited was Russia. Communication was difficult because of my inexperience, few English-speakers and an unfamiliar alphabet. While I was there, several people asked me if I spoke Esperanto. Also, by some coincidence, the route I took while traveling put me in every city in northern Europe one week behind a band called “Esperanto Desperado.”

This trip was an excellent idea for me because it allowed me to escape the values of Silicon Valley. The culture there was scornful of anything related to art or culture or of anything not brand-new. This was the exact opposite of what is valuable to tourists in Europe. [For Wesleyan, talk about meeting Judy in Germany]

When I returned home, I decided to switch career tracks from computer programming to composition. I also enrolled in an Esperanto class, at Stanford. I wrote several pieces of tape music, which I submitted to several festivals. Woodstockhausen decided to play one. I decided I wanted to write more music for live performance, so I organized a percussion group and wrote some music for them. The group performed some of my work at an art opening. I also did computer consulting. I was not sure how to pull my work and aspirations together into a career.

Last spring I attended the Composing a Career Conference sponsored by the Women’s Philharmonic. Almost everyone else there had a master’s degree and the presenters all assumed they were speaking to a master’s-level audience. Realizing that I needed more education, I started looking into graduate programs. Yours caught my interest because of your faculty [- talk about faculty.]

At [school] I hope to learn more about electronic music and also about composition for live performance. I would like to branch out into writing for live electronic performance, something that�s difficult to do with a modular synthesizer. I hope to learn more mediums for composition. I would also like to explore more writing for traditional instruments. [school] has a reputation for performance as well as composition and I hope to be able to work with some of the performers studying there.

After I graduate with a Masters degree, I hope to find success as a freelance composer. I am also interested in doing music research at a center like STEIM, IRCAM or ZKM, or a comparable center in the United States. I know that [school] could give me the skills and education necessary to achieve this goal. Your excellent reputation would also help my professional aspirations. I hope you consider me for your program.

This is much longer, but I think it’s better because it actually talks about music, which is something my old one had probably too little of. It’s choppy and scattered especially in the middle. I must rearrange it so the parts that go together end up together. I think I should probably cut the part about having to learn theory after being told i didn’t need theory, since it’s neither here nor there and it might make me look lazy, which would be bad. Do I talk too much about Esperanto? I think putting all of it next to each other would help make it more compact. It’s also beside the point, but it’s unusual and might make me seem more interesting. Lou Harrison is a fluent esperantist. I should definietly add something about Other Minds, especially since one of my refrences comes from there. Maybe I could work in something about speaking esperanto with Lou, or would that be silly name-dropping? Arg, I need to finish this, especially for CalArts, tomorrow! I haven’t put together a portfolio yet. Some of these school want three works. How can I possibly communicate my skillset in just three works?? I think I’d better send email and ask if that’s a minimum or what. I must definitely fight the urge to make a new recording to show off every possible skill at once. “This piece is written for a vocalist (note esperanto text), a synthezier, a marimba, 5 found objects, a contact microphone and a special piece of software written just for this one piece.” nononono

What I did today… er… yesterday

Finally lined up my third letter of recommendation. Christi’s boss is going to write one. He’s the director of Other Minds, which I did some volunteer work for. Actually, kind of a lot of volunteer work, some of it skilled w/ pro-tools and stuff. It’s so awesome that he’s going to write a letter.
Wesleyan wants a writing sample. I have exactly one paper left from school. It’s the tuba paper on my website. The spelling is being fixed. God knows why I handed in a paper without running a spell check on it. As I recall, finding research materials on the history of the tuba turned out to be somewhat challenging (go figure) and I think I turned in the paper late. This is an ill-omened paper all the way around. The graphics and the bibliography all got lost in the giant system crash of 1997. (Teeth were gnashed. Wails arose from the valley. The one server at Mills that handled everything had a head crash and all was lost and the campus was offline for a month or maybe just a week, anyway, I was lucky even part of my paper survived. All the rest of my papers were lost when the disk on my old server gave up the ghost. I think that if I reassembled the computer with the old motherboard, the old disk controller and the old disks, they would probably work again, if I could re-discover all those hardware settings from the time before auto-detect. But that’s a lot of work for what might be a low payoff. Academic writing was never my strongest point. I used to joke that’s why I took music and computer science, because of the dearth of required papers.) Well, it wasn’t entirely ill-omened. I got email from the principal tubist of the Vienna Philharmonic asking about the biliography because he was interested in my paper. I’m going to be able to email him back with some answers, because today I went to the Mills library to try to re-construct my bibliography. I was not 100% successful in this quest, but I did manage to identify who all the authors are (probably) and direct readers to their web pages or books by them that are at least on the same subject. Christi is telling me not to worry about this too much and maybe I should just submit one of my many political manifestos.
And, while at Mills, I got my transcript requests. I still need to worry about transcripts from the Junior College I went to a long long time ago. I was still in highschool at the time. My theory is that it shouldn’t count, even if I did transfer in credits towards my degree. Sheesh, I transfered in AP Test credits too. I hope I don’t need to go scare those up.
Mills is on break, but I still ran into several people, including a CS professor, Susan Wang. We chatted a bit. And I ran into Maggi Payne, my composition teacher who is writing a letter for me. We talked about people she knew at all the schools I’m looking at. Everyone went to Mills. I need to talk a lot more about CCM in my statements. And then, in the library, I ran into Sharon. It’s nice seeing familiar faces.
And then I had to run someplace else to drop off forms and then I had to get Christi and take her someplace. And then we went to Gaylords for coffee and ran into Luoi, Fausto and Timananana. Yay! More happy people! I usually don’t see so many people in a week.
And now I am somewhat procrastinating on filling out my calarts application, since I’m not sure about listing my Community College stuff or not. I guess I have to. Something is amiss with my printer and the colors are not lining up 100%, so everything is slightly blurry. The application is in color. None of the text is actually black, it’s some trendy shade of grey. I understand being as artistic as possible when designeing printed material for an arts college, but when you’re publishing a PDF on the web for folks to use, it’s important to consider technological limittations. Gray-scale is good. Black text is good. Design for the common-person and her cheap printer! Oh…. I should make Mitch print it.
Anyway, all of this is wayyyy too last minute. I haven’t been this last-second since I was an undergrad. I’m too old for this now. I might put it off till next year, except now I’ve got all these other people involved. Anyway, I’m so busy, I hardly even have time to mourn! I think I want to go crawl into a hole and lie there quietly for several days.

Statement of Purpose – CalArts

When I was in high school, I had to decide between pursuing a career in computer programming or in professional tuba playing. On the advice of my tuba teacher, I chose computer science. In college, I finished all the requirements for my major by my junior year, so I took music classes and got interested in composition. I graduated with two majors.

I started a professional career in computer programming, the plan I chose for economic reasons. It wasn’t long before I realized that studying computer science is interesting, but day-to-day programming is not. I had a hard time fitting in the culture of Silicon Valley. When I got laid off in 2001, I didn’t look for a job right away, but instead considered making a career change to music, but as a composer, rather than as a tuba player.

Last spring I attended the Composing a Career Conference sponsored by the Women’s Philharmonic. Almost everyone else there had a master’s degree and the presenters all assumed they were speaking to a master’s-level audience. Realizing I needed more education, I started looking into graduate programs. Yours caught my interest because of your reputation and your composition � new media program.

I am a noise artist. Primarily, I do tape music, but I would like to branch out to writing for live electronic performance. Your composition-new media program is exciting since it seems to be set up for people with my goals and experience. Your reputation and faculty greatly impress me. I hope to study with Mortin Subotnic, because of his work with MIDI performance tools. His MIDI Jacket is fascinating because of how it links music to gesture. I would like to study the creation and usage of similar tools for application in my own compositions.

Did I spell Subotnic’s name right? Did he really invent the MIDI jacket or do I have him confused with someone else? Must double-check. Subotnic, along with Pauline oliveros, was a cofounder of the SF Tape Music Center, which later became CCM. I should talk more about stuff I did at CCM. I saw the MIDI jacket live in concert at the SF Electronic Music Festival. I stood behind Subotnic in line for the bathroom and asked him a million questions about it, sicne it’s just so dern facinating. He didn’t seem to mind at all and was very cool about answering questions and talking about things he built. I think he used to to be at STEIM. STEIM is really awesome center for new sounds creation devices (especially MIDI stuff in the old days) that’s in Amsterdam. When I was in Amsterdam, I stopped by STEIM, but they were busy setting up for a concert in Switzerland and sisn’t have time to talk to tourists. I name-dropped like crazy and half the names were set to perform in their concert. anyway. maybe i should try to get an interview with calarts.