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The faculty of the BC-CCM includes:
George Brunner
George Brunner is a composer and performer, researcher/writer, recording engineer/producer and teacher. His music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America. His most recent commissions include Summoning, for The Tempest Project CD (Pogus Productions Label, 2008); an electroacoustic work for voice and cello commissioned by Monica Harte for Long Island Songs (MSR Classics Label, 2008); a one-minute electronic work commissioned by Vox Novus for 60×60 (2008); a substantial electroacoustic work commissioned with Residency by Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges (IMEB) (spring 2009); and his first opera, Delete, commissioned by Remarkable Theater Brigade for performance at Carnegie Hall (fall 2009).
Brunner has produced leading composers in the electroacoustic world, including Morton Subotnick (with whom he studied at Cal Arts), John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Dick, Charles Dodge, Jon Appleton, Noah Creshevsky and James Mobberley; international artists including Jean Claude Risset, Lars Gunnar Bodin, and Sten Hanson; and the directors of IMEB Françoise Barriere and Christian Clozier. An authority on text sound, he has received research grants from the American Scandinavian Foundation and the Svenska Institutet of Sweden to write a book on text sound composition.
Brunner is the general and artistic director for Electronic Music New York.
Douglas Geers
Douglas Geers is a composer who works extensively with technology in composition, performance and multimedia collaborations. Recent works include Inanna, a 90-minute multimedia theater work (Zürich, 2009); an opera, Calling, (New York City, 2008); Sweep, a work for laptop orchestra (Chicago; Princeton, New Jersey; New York; Minneapolis, 2008–09); and a violin concerto, Laugh Perfumes (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2006).
Geers has won numerous grants and awards, including a 2009 Bush Foundation Fellowship Finalist award, 2008 Argossy commission award, 2007 McKnight Composer Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Composers Commissioning Project prizes in both 2007 and 2001, a Fulbright scholarship and others.
Geers studied via scholarships at Xavier University, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 2002. From 2002 to 2009 he taught at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he founded and directed the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts; and in fall 2009 he joined the faculty of the Brooklyn College Conservatory, where he is an associate professor of music and director of the Center for Computer Music.
Faculty Bio
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Douglas Cohen
Doug Cohen received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, and his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is undergraduate deputy, lecturer, coordinator of music composition, and director of the Brooklyn College Composers’ Forum.
Cohen is an intermedia composer and often collaborator with film, performance, and folk artists as well as an early advocate for digital media on the Internet. He organized the NewMusNet Conference of Arts Wire with Pauline Oliveros and later was Arts Wire Systems coordinator.
Cohen is a specialist in American experimental music with particular attention to the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Pauline Oliveros. He co-created and produced the evening-length intermedia work imusicircus at Experimental Intermedia in New York and LACE Gallery in Los Angeles (later with the California EAR Unit at the L.A. County Museum of Art) as City Circus events for the John Cage exhibition Rolywholyover a Circus.
Jonathan Zalben
Jonathan Zalben’s work includes scores for film and television, concert works, and interactive multimedia installations, at times including his own performance on violin. In September 2016, Zalben joined the Music Composition faculty of Brooklyn College, with a specific focus on teaching in the college’s new M.F.A. programs in media scoring and sonic arts.
Zalben has written music for films released by HBO, Lionsgate, Discovery, and Sony Pictures Classics. His film music has also screened at the Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, and Tribeca film festivals. He scored the feature film Flock of Dudes, starring Chris D’Elia and Hannah Simone, which will be released by Starz, theatrically and on VOD this fall. Other scores include the Oscar-nominated Redemption, directed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill, as well as the HBO documentary There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Diane, directed by Liz Garbus. Previously, his music has been heard at Sundance in Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Evan Glodell’s Bellflower, and Hotel 22, a New York Times op-doc directed by Elizabeth Lo.
Zalben is also a music supervisor and runs the music licensing company First Frame Music. Recent music supervision credits include Janis: Little Girl Blue, currently airing on PBS, and The Fixer, starring James Franco and Melissa Leo, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. He also music supervised Courteney Cox’s directorial debut Just Before I Go as well as Adam Goldberg’s No Way Jose.
Zalben studied music composition and violin at NYU, Yale, and Juilliard Pre-College. He previously taught courses in creating music and sound for picture as well as interactive media at Yale, The New School, Bloomfield College, and York College (CUNY).
Bio
Jules Gimbrone. Photo: Malanda Jean-ClaudeJules Gimbrone
Jules Gimbrone creates fragile corporeal sound and sculptural ensembles that highlight the differentiations between modes of perceptual acquisition—specifically visual and sonic—within complex and precarious arrangements of subjects and objects. Building on this is an expansive idea of the phenomenology of resonance–social performativity, identity development, subject/object relationships, etc.–all being inherent to the accumulation of layers that are built on materially transparent, fragile, surfaces. Resonance, as a set of conditions or relationships between things, becomes activated and legible through light and sound then complicated through abstraction and perceptual manipulations.
Gimbrone’s works have appeared at such venues as Walker Art Center, Stellar Projects, SculptureCenter, ISSUE Project Room, The Rubin Museum, MOMA PS1, REDCAT, Human Resources LA, Park View Gallery, Vox Populi, and Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva, Switzerland. Gimbrone received an M.F.A. in music composition and integrated media from CalARTS in 2014. In 2018 Gimbrone received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and was accepted to In Practice at SculptureCenter.
David Grubbs
David Grubbs received his B.A. from Georgetown University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Grubbs is professor of music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the M.F.A. programs in performance and interactive media arts (PIMA) and creative writing.
He is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press), which has been translated into French, Italian, and Japanese.
Grubbs has released 12 solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody; visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina; and choreographer Jonah Bokaer, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Loren Connors, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, director of the Blue Chopsticks record label, and a member of ISSUE Project Room’s board of directors.
Marianne Gythfeldt
Clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt is a leading interpreter of contemporary repertoire, and electroacoustic music in particular. She has premiered more than 100 new works and performed widely in Europe, Asia, and the United States as a soloist and member of Talea Ensemble, Zephyros Winds, and as a performer with Absolute Ensemble and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Solo and chamber music recordings include the works of Robert Morris (Albany Records), Elliott Carter (Mode Records), Morton Feldman with New Millennium Ensemble (Koch Records), and Music of Joe Zawinul with Absolute Ensemble (Sunnyside Records).
Gythfeldt holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Stony Brook and the Eastman School of Music, and she is a recipient of the Naumburg Chamber Music award as the clarinetist of New Millennium Ensemble. She has taught on the faculty of the University of Delaware and William Paterson University, and she is currently on the faculty of the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, where she teaches clarinet and chamber music and co-directs the new music ensemble conTEMPO.
Angela Piva
Angela Piva is an audio/mix engineer and producer, highly skilled in all aspects of music/audio production, including recording, mixing, and mastering. She has over 28 years of professional audio engineering experience and accolades including several Grammy Award nominations from NARAS, as well as RIAA multi-platinum sales of recordings on which she worked.
Piva’s credits include:
Piva has a bachelor’s degree in music production and engineering from the Berklee School of Music and a Master of Arts Music (M.A.T.) degree from Lehman College (CUNY). She is a member of AES, NARAS, and ASCAP.
In her current position, Piva brings her cutting-edge knowledge to the Feirstein School of Cinema facility, which she manages, and to the music and cinema M.F.A. student body. On any given day, one might find her at work in the Audio Control Room, the Foley studio, the ADR room, or in a 5.1 suite, working on sessions that run the gamut from dialogue replacement, acoustic and orchestral recording, to mixing audio to picture.
Morton Subotnick
Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work that brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon (1966–67), commissioned by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium—a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system constituted a present-day form of chamber music. It has become a modern classic and was recently entered into the National Register of Recorded Works at the Library of Congress. Only 300 recordings throughout the entire history of recorded music have been chosen.
In the early 1960s, Subotnick taught at Mills College, and, with Ramon Sender, he co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center. During this period he collaborated with Anna Halprin in two works (the 3 legged stool and Parades and Changes) and was music director of the Actors Workshop. It was also during this period that Subotnick worked with Don Buchla on what may have been the first analog synthesizer (now at the Library of Congress).
In 1966 Subotnick was instrumental in getting a Rockefeller Grant to join the Tape Center with the Mills Chamber Players (at Mills College with performers Nate Rubin, violin; Bonnie Hampton, cello; Naomi Sparrow, piano and Subotnick, clarinet). The grant required that the Tape Center relocate to a host institution that became Mills College. Subotnick, however, did not stay with the move, but went to New York with the Actors Workshop to become the first music director of the Lincoln Center Rep Company in the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. He became an artist in residence at the newly formed Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. The School of the Arts provided him with a studio and a Buchla Synthesizer. During this period he helped develop and became artistic director of the Electric Circus and the Electric Ear. This was also the time of the creation of Silver Apples of the Moon, The Wild Bull and Touch.
In 1969 Subotnick was invited to be part of a team of artists to move to Los Angeles to plan a new school of the arts. With Mel Powell as dean and a team of four other pairs of artists, Subotnick, as associate dean, carved out a new path of music education and created the now famous California Institute of the Arts. Subotnick remained associate dean of the music school for four years and then, resigning as associate dean, became the head of the composition program where, a few years later, he created a new media program that introduced interactive technology and multimedia into the curriculum.
Subotnick is now pioneering works to offer musical creative tools to young children. He is the author of a series of CD-ROMs for children and a children’s website and is developing a program for classroom and after-school programs that will soon become available internationally.
Among Subotnick’s awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Rockefeller Grants, two Meet the Composers, American Academy of Arts and Letters Composer Award, Brandies Award, Deutcher Akademisher Austauschdienst Kunsterprogramm (DAAD), Composer in Residence in Berlin, Lifetime Achievement Award (SEAMUS at Dartmouth), ASCAP: John Cage Award, ACO: Lifetime Achievement, and Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.
Morton Subotnick tours extensively throughout the United States and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.
Students
BC-CCM students include people from all parts of the world, studying toward undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees.
Since the debut of our M.F.A. programs in sonic arts and media scoring in fall 2016, we have a large cohort of graduate student composers focused on new media as well as other music majors and students from programs, including PIMA, computer science, television/radio, film, theater, etc.
Many of these artists’ visits were made possible by the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music.
