Kenneth Kirschner
Composer
Kenneth Kirschner is a key member of a new generation of experimental composers working at the interface between digital technology and avant-garde composition. He is also known as a leading advocate of open-source online music.
Kirschnerıs compositions are constructed from a diverse array of sound sources, and frequently integrate processed acoustic instruments such as piano and percussion with field recordings and purely digital sound. Although his work is realized electronically, Kirschnerıs interests extend beyond pure timbre to broader questions of harmony, microtonality, polyrhythm, large-scale form, narrative, and compositional processes such as chance and indeterminacy. His work derives most directly from ³modern classical² composers such as Morton Feldman, John Cage, Meredith Monk and Philip Glass, although his music is also influenced by a wide range of sources, from 80s pop, industrial and electronic dance music to Western classical, jazz and percussion traditions from around the world. His work is also informed by broad interests in philosophy, the sciences, and literature, among other fields.
The central focus of Kirschnerıs artistic efforts is his website, www.kennethkirschner.com. Here, he makes available a comprehensive archive of his published recordings spanning three decades all freely accessible for download by any interested listener. The site presents all his compositions, each titled by the date on which it was begun, on a single timeline stretching from the 1980s to the present. Beyond his website, Kirschnerıs music has been widely released on CD from record labels such as 12k, Sub Rosa, Sirr, and/OAR, and Leerraum, and his recordings have been showcased by a large number of netlabels from around the world. All of these releases, both CD and online, have been under open licenses such as the Creative Commons license.
This open source approach extends to his interactions with other artists as well. In addition to a number of direct collaborations (for example, the post piano series with Taylor Deupree), Kirschner strongly encourages the free sampling and remixing of his work by other artists. In 2005, he helped curate the post piano 2 Open Remix Project, an open call for remixes of his piece ³November 11, 2003² that ultimately received over a hundred interpretations from around the world. His work has also formed the basis for a number of releases by other artists, including recent CDs from skoltz kolgen and vidnaObmana.
In 2004, Kirschner began a series of generative compositions that attempt to bring Cagean notions of indeterminacy into the context of online digital music. Constructed in Flash, these compositions are available from his site as downloadable, browser-based applications. Through the use of built-in chance procedures, the pieces in this series are both indeterminate in composition (they will be different on each listening) as well as indefinite in duration (the pieces will play for as long as the listener wishes, without direct repetition).
In addition to the indeterminate series, Kirschnerıs recent projects have included March 16, 2006, a requiem for the neuroscientist James H. Schwartz that is, at 72 minutes, his longest composition to date; CD releases such as Three Compositions (Sirr, 2006) and May 6, 2001 (and/OAR, 2006), an anthology based on his early-2001 field recordings of the streets of Lower Manhattan; a piece for the sonoluminescence installation Camera Lucida by Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch, to be released on a forthcoming DVD from Line; and adaptations of pieces from his indeterminate series for modern dance performances in New York City and sound art installations in Switzerland and the United Kingdom. He has also performed internationally, including a number of recent concerts in Spain.
Kenneth Kirschner was born in 1970 in Princeton, NJ, USA. He lives in New York City.
www.kennethkirschner.com.
email: music@kennethkirschner.com
|
|
