Edmund Campion Personal Statement 2024

I am a composer of music, and my work is inextricably tied to the history of emerging technologies that track alongside the decades of my life (b.1957). My major career move in the 1990’s was tied to music making and systems thinking, notions of the cyborg, mixed with ideas connected to the history of the Grotesque, a world first introduced to me in 1989 through the digital artist Claudia Hart. Scholar Geoffroy Harpham speaks of our interactions on these matters in the preface to his book, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Times change, and in these recent years I have been addressing issues that reset my relationships with emerging technologies including AI. I have been retooling, relearning, and rebuilding, in a period where I have grappled with the many cultural changes and with an eyes-wide-open examination of how computational technologies and data are transforming society and culture. I do compose pieces and put them in the world, and on an international level. My priority recently has been on reaffirming and rediscovering my reasons for creating music, to do that creating in a more fluent and healthy way, and to share those results with all those who might be interested.

I have been in the process of building a plateau, both a technological support world and a network of collaborators that enable me to further augment the key projects that have driven my creative efforts for these many decades. My ability to share and work with others as equal progressive creators is exponentially greater now. I have achieved a sustainable, composable, and teachable approach to music creation that is forward leaning, and I believe fits better the conditions of this 2024 moment.

Research, Creation, Aesthetics, and Practice

Accomplishments since 2019 have been focused on completing new works and further designing my personalized amalgam of technologies that augment my ability to compose, increase my collaborative agency, and open toward a diversity of uses for my artistic research.

Versatility has been alwasy been key to my work and is evident as I attempt to bring my research full circle and always to a musical end. My work is not just a series of experiments in music. Auditory Fiction II (2014-15), where dynamic tempo studies are fully realized into performable and audible illusions in sound; Cluster X (2015-16), where collaboration between visual artist and composer do more than just present sound with film; Out of Thin Air (2016-17) where communal sharing takes the stage; Audible Numbers (2017-18), where cross cultural exchange goes beyond what either might do on their own; BLAST (2017-18) where a large scale ensemble plays its heart out; Late Bloomer (2018-19) where computational systems and music merge and flower; Recumulations (2019-20) where systems interface and empower collaborating artists to reach beyond mere synchronization of parts; The Ruins (2020-21) where generating music systems come together with virtual reality; ilSuono (2021-22) where you find my aesthetic for realtime electronics sounding; These Things Happen (or not) (2022-23) where a collaboration results in a great summing up of creative impulses;The Velvet Algorithm (2023), a return to the concert stage with a huge twist and rethinking of what constitutes musical material itself; and finally, Le Sillage (WAKE) (2024) where improvising cellist, Danielle DeGruttola is invited to compose and produce live electronics in a performance-based composition that fits inside a fully composed score.

Collaborative research has been key to my work and is exemplified in my 2016 Guggenheim project with the South Korean Gugak Orchestra and the amazing musicians playing traditional Korean instruments at the National Gugak Center in Seoul. This was a consciousness broadening exercise where I discovered a new way to interact with people and made a connection between ancient interfaces/musical instruments and current technologies. Now in 2024, I am continuing with new projects involving the same Gugak musicians as we embark together on creating a new world for traditional Korean instruments and live electronics.

Internationally acclaimed digital artist Claudia Hart and I have collaborated closely since 2011 on a series of largescale virtual-reality and augmented-reality pieces known as the Alices Project. Consisting of more than a dozen works, two of which have been purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art, this collaborative process has been something like that of Cage/Cunningham. I have been inspired by this artist and deeply affected by her address of issues related to the feminine representation in the digital arts. In the last four years I am concerned with building compositional systems that are specific to each largescale project like the Alices. In the case of Hart, these tools don’t just spit out music or sound, they provide a production plateau that supports sharing and exploration. The tool allows material to be modified to meet more specifically the needs of a particular piece, gallery, or museum show. As a trained composer, I use musical notation as a primary work board, but other artists mostly can't make heads or tails of it -- they need audibile experience. My technology tools provide for flexible, fast,audible modeling that serves as a medium-translating assistant to better inform my collaborators how sound/music might affect a project. My compositional practice is embodied in these technological tools and the tools have become more deeply personal, individualized, and project specific.

Equally important to me is a growing devotion to local and community-based art making with myself as producer, improvisor and performer. My commission from the Fleishacker Foundation for the Arts, Out of Thin Air, composed for Under the Spires at the First Presbyterian Church of Oakland in 2016 involved other musician friends, students, and my family as guest performers. I direct and perform with my collaborators, using my technological tool base as the glue that brings it all together.

My artistic process is a ground for questioning and proposing sharable tools, not just producing music/sound. I research how things are made; a process that helps drive my role as Director at CNMAT (2014-2024), now Co-Director (since 2024). The 2023 Velvet Algorithms, for large ensemble and electronics, recently premiered at the Festival Empreintes in Lyon, France, and again by the ECO Ensemble at Cal Performances, features in the third section a synthesized female AI voice calling out “Eddie, why are you doing this?”. Behind the Velvet Algorithms is a fully conceived album length project, a complete computational environment for composing, and a compositional design that allows for the material to be repurposed, recombined, and further operated on for the purpose of a full-length album production.

My earlier cyborgian influences have given way to the expanded intelligence of cooperating systems. I don’t just compose pieces; I compose systems and those systems help me make music that has a unique signature all my own. Pieces like These Things Happen (or not), for marimba and electronics, and ilSuono, for trio and electronics demonstrate how the systems I create are workable in large series that produce wide-ranging results. In my current works, I value more than ever the performers themselves and now provide space for them to have more agency within the music.

CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies)

In 2014 I was asked to direct the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). Over these years, I am especially proud of my work in creating a more diverse and open CNMAT, one that emphasizes the importance of community involvement and encourages broad access and creativity of all types. I continually endeavor to invite and include the UC, Bay Area, and International communities to take part in CNMAT for performances, education, research, and engagement. I encourage reviewers to examine the CNMAT Activities reports and Newsletters to understand the extent of my daily involvement with CNMAT. There is not a single activity in which I did not play a strong hand. Although CNMAT has been useful to me as a creator it shows in my tenure that it is not my house, but more a project of community and inclusion for other creators who are not necessarily in my camp.

I set 6 priorities when I accepted to be Director CNMAT: 1) work toward securing a faculty replacement position in computer music research, someone who could eventually assume directorial responsibilities at CNMAT, 2) maintain the CNMAT software repository legacy, 3) involve the music composition program more fruitfully into the life of CNMAT, 4) create new accessibility and openness for students and community to share in the life at CNMAT, 5) focus research on developing practical generalized tools in digital music technology that serve the technological needs of composers, 6) solve pedagogical needs. Over the last years, each of these goals have been achieved. I 2018, I was instrumental in the hire of Professor Carmine Cella, an internationally recognized computer music research and composer who has now gained tenure and is sharing directorial responsibilities for CNMAT. The CNMAT public software repositories are healthy and available on GitHub with the two legacy packages, the CNMAT externals (45k downloads) and odot (5.5k downloads) available and regularly updated on the Max package release system. Composition students are active at CNMAT under the structure of the CNMAT Users Group (CUG), fully student managed. I implemented and oversaw the creation of “CNMAT Pedagogy”, a deep collection of teaching materials that are managed by CNMAT and used to form the basis of the Music and Technology curriculum in the Department of Music.

On the research and tool development side I have followed a tried and true working model. As I and others at CNMAT have worked on compositions involving emerging technologies, we identify technical needs that have no reasonable outside solution. We prototype the solution software and then pass that on to a development programmer who can implement the tool in a robust, general way. The results are always shared on GitHub or in the Max Packages Manager. This practice has resulted in several components including the very successful visual metronome, the resonance model generators made by Jeremy Wagner, as well as the OM-TESSELATE library which has been so useful to me as a composer in the last few years.

TEACHING

My dedication to teaching is profound and powerfully evident at both the undergraduate and graduate levels across the years of this review. The last four years has seen more acknowledgement internationally than ever before regarding my teaching. I was honored to be invited as the Slee Visiting Professor at the University of Buffalo in 2021, was the invited Composer in Residence for the 2022 IlSuono summer workshops in Italy, and in 2023 I was a guest Professor at the National Conservatory in Lyon.

My teaching is far more than just my presence in the classroom. One of my undergraduate students wrote to me after a recent semester the following personal note, “As I am now just a few short days away from graduating, I am writing to express my gratitude to you for allowing me to be involved at CNMAT these last couple of years. Whether experimenting in the rear studio, learning Max 8, or getting the opportunity to help with the Velvet Algorithms project this semester, I have learned an immense amount from you. It is great to see that 107 is being offered more generally to music students at Cal next year, and I know the students who enroll will also love their time there. My time at CNMAT has been one of the highlights of my time at Berkeley, and I hope one day I can come back and visit/help out on other projects.”

Involvements with emerging technologies presupposes a deep interest in teaching and pedagogy as it becomes incumbent on the producers of new tools to show the relevance as well as the methods for using such tools. On my direction, CNMAT retools and renews its teaching materials on a yearly basis. I laid the foundation and provided many of the max patches for the CNMAT Pedagogy an organizational software approach that fuels key courses in Music Tech at Cal.

This is part of the teaching mission as I see it; to bring the student along with me and provide openings and professional opportunities for them. I strive to bring outstanding, professional musicians from around the world to CNMAT to perform and teach students, so they are exposed to a diversity of musical and artistic styles. In the Fall 2022, different composers were brought to CNMAT on a weekly basis to share their expertise. I am often present to setup, record, mix, produce, and tear down projects and concerts, and teach and assist students to do the same. I endeavor to make CNMAT a physically comfortable space for the students and community, sometimes taking on a role of building manager to make sure this happens. Concerts at CNMAT are usually free to the public and are regularly attended by people of all ages from the surrounding community.

PERSONAL STATEMENT 2019

I belong to a generation of composers whose compositional training coincided with the demise of post-war avant-garde aesthetics dominating sectors of the American University education scene in the seventies and early eighties.  The environment fostered a spirit of openness and experimentation for new musical ideas and at the same time instilled a sense of futility, stemming from broader feelings of cultural isolation.  The many brilliant academically-housed composers I worked with and learned from, saw themselves as musical masters existing in a cultural space that did not comprehend their musical practices. 

Between 1989 and 1996 I pursued educational and professional opportunities outside the United States and immersed myself in French, Italian and German new music cultures.  I confronted my educational and cultural history and began developing a coherent personal compositional voice.  I came to understand that the responsibility of a composer extends beyond the mastery of the techniques and materials of music to include issues related to the cultural fabric at large.  My artistic interests are broad, oftentimes pressing the limits of the discipline itself.

Computers and Music Composition

My fascination with computers and music grew from a natural tendency to seek and explore new musical landscapes.  Below,  I briefly describe five new compositions that represent a microcosm of my creative work in relation to computers.  These pieces were premiered collectively by the CNMAT/TEMPO Festival of Contemporary Performance in a monograph evening of music in 2001

Domus Aurea for vibraphone and piano uses only acoustic instruments, but the composition is reliant on current computer music techniques.  Methods related to spectral analysis expose pathways for combining the instruments in new and unusual ways and algorithmic processes open the doors to expanded musical materials.

Natural Selection features the composer/pianist interfaced with a real-time reactive computer system.  A codified harmonic grammar allows direct and immediate communication with the composer-designed computer software.  The software tools employed in Natural Selection are re-formed and adapted to every new performance situation.  It is a composition that continually evolves and is resilient enough to match the rapid changes in today's technology. To date, I have composed six versions of Natural Selection, the most recent for the International Computer Music Conference in Havana, Cuba.  Each version expands upon a base of knowledge that is always growing.

L'Autre(The Other), for ensemble and electronics, was commissioned by Radio France and demonstrates my commitment to extra-musical explorations and collaborative art works.  Through a deeply inter-woven exchange with poet John Campion, The Other attempts to create a common ground for the interaction of music and text;  a shared space where one art form can co-exists with another to the benefit of both.  L'Autre belongs to a large three-piece cycle.  The second piece was commissioned by the Centre National de Création Musicale in Nice where I am invited to spend six weeks in residence next summer.

Corail for tenor saxophone and live computer-processed sound explores the prospects of open forms and open structures.  In Corail, the musical fabric adapts to the extended possibilities of current  computer technology.  From the sonic well of the live instrumentalist (moving freely in the concert hall), the computer extracts fine details of pitches, dynamics, durations and silences, using the special grammar and syntax of the composer to transform the data into an oceanic flow.  Corail unveils a computer-generated ecosystem that works to redefine the relationship of a composer to his materials, a performer to his practice, and a listener to a performance.

Finally, Sons et Lumières features a player piano with a computer generated score, live video projections and an eight-channel surround sound system.  The concert space explodes with image and sound;  the player piano ghosts a lost tradition of silent film accompaniment;  the surround sound envelops the listener. The artistic concerns explored in this work were discussed collectively during the symposium Beyond the Proscenium that I organized with CNMAT and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities in 1999. 

Musical/Artistic Collaborations

I am deeply committed to exploring alternative sites for new music and collaborative arts.  My work with poets, dancers, and plastic artists has resulted in projects that involve non-traditional performance spaces, new types of performance practice, as well as the development of related new music software.  Metronome, a collaboration with the art team of Andrew Ginzel and Kristin Jones, is a sound installation with computer originally located in the heart of Manhattan at Union Square.  Playback, in collaboration with choreographer François Raffinot is an evening length spectacle of dance, video, and live music with computers. Volume;  bed of sound is a collective sound-art exhibition created by the Museum of Modern Art affiliate P.S.1 that is currently touring the United States.

Teaching Philosophy

My position at UC Berkeley was written for a composer specializing in computer music who is also qualified to teach the standard undergraduate and graduate curriculum offered by the Department of Music.  The international reputation of CNMAT as a cutting-edge computer music research center combined with the high academic standards of the Department of Music has made this job exceptionally challenging.  From the start, my goal has been to establish the greatest possible cooperation between the Department of Music and CNMAT.  In 2005, I became the Co-Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.  My role there is to foster creation of new music and to build the pedagogical models necessary for new music creation and production.

I am especially proud of the course Musical Applications of Computers and Related Technologies (Music 158).  I have updated Music 158 continually over the past ten years to keep pace with the ever-changing landscape of technology and music; I have transformed it  into a lecture/lab based course featuring the most up to date teaching materials and methods.  CNMAT now hosts extensive software downloads to support courses like Music 158 which focus on music and music creation.