Artistic Work
I am an American composer whose current work focuses on ways of composing experiences within and through background sociomusical activities. This work has thus far involved audiences and performing musicians listening to audio guides that lead them across discreet sonic, choreographic, and emotional terrains in parallel with musical performances and interpersonal interactions in concert settings.
Recent work has explored relationships between composition, bodies in performance, and documentation practices surrounding musical work. Through that exploration, a framework for conceiving ‘documents as scores’ was developed to demonstrate ways in which documents of music performance – such as physical and digital sheet music, video and audio recordings, as well as embodied musical memories of living human beings – could be subjected to compositional protocols and situations and become scores for performance. This interdisciplinary research is detailed in my PhD thesis, titled Effaced, Reflected, Being: Documents and/of/as Musicking Bodies.
Prior work focused on the ephemerality and material impermanency of scores, and visual and psychological excesses of music notation.
Profile
This work has been performed internationally by performers including Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Kevin Fairbairn / Juna Winston, Diego Castro Magaš, Carl Roseman, and Samuel Stoll; and ensembles including les trombones de bâle, The Discord Workshop, Inlets Ensemble, and ensemble x.y; at festivals/venues including 840, Rock, Paper, Scissors at Audiotheque, CLAC, Hard Music and Hard Liquor at Constellation DurhamKLANG14, Gare de Nord, MIRY Concert Hall, The University of Huddersfield, Weisslich at Hundred Years Gallery, Hochshule für Musik und Theater Leipzig, iklectik, Unternehmen Mitte, and VIRTUALLYREALITY at Partisan; broadcast on Radio SRF2 Kultur; and released on the net-label The Weekend EP Project.
I have discussed my work at the Time Stands Still: Notation in Musical Practice conference at Wesleyan University, and at guest presentations for composition studios at Bowling Green State University and the Hochshule für Musik und Theater Leipzig. Notable mention of my work includes a group profile of artists working with new score forms by Tim Rutherford-Johnson in The Wire, examples from my vocal piece Various Terrains in the second edition of Michael Edgerton’s The 21st Century Voice, and ephemera from my S[h/c]attered Shards of Experience series in Nomi Epstin’s ‘Musical Fragility: A Phenomenological Exploration’ published in Tempo.
I am also active as a writer in the field of music, having published research in CeReNeM Journal, guest blogging for Tempus Konnex and The Rambler, profiling artists for Weisslich’s ‘Better Know’ series, and reviewing for Tempo.
I hold PhD and Masters by Research degrees in Composition from The University of Huddersfield where I studied under the supervision of Aaron Cassidy and Liza Lim, and a Bachelor of Music in Composition from Bowling Green State University where I studied under Burton Beerman, Christopher Dietz, Mikel Kuehn, and Andrea Reinkemeyer. Other teachers have included Peter Ablinger and Franklin Cox.
In addition to composing, I am an occasional performer. Notable projects include a study and performances of Charlie Sdraulig’s vocal solo few, a realization of Luke Nickel’s conceptual living-archive piece factory, and performances of a voice and electronics solo, No sweeter sound than my own name, composed by and collaboratively developed with Beavan Flanagan.
Since 2014, I have been co-curating and producing the UK-based experimental music and performance series Weisslich.
I provide engraving services, with work published in Routledge and Twentieth Century Music.
I currently live and work in Chicago, IL.
“The beautiful result [of a kind of nostalgia] is a slow dismantling of [Fernando] Sor’s melody, a distortion not only heard but seen and empathetically felt in the movements of the two guitarists. As their bodies sway around each other in mirror form, eyes locked, and fragments of Sor drop away like items of clothing, this odd exercise in musical deconstruction takes on a strikingly intimate, even erotic dimension.”
– Tim Rutherford-Johnson [‘Unsettling Scores’, The Wire]
Michael Baldwin 