The Department of Music is pleased to announce the appointment of Scott Smallwood to the Composition staff effective 1 July 2009.
Scott Smallwood was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up at 10,000 feet in elevation in the Colorado Rockies. When Smallwood was 10 years old, his father gave him a cassette tape recorder, and ever since he has been fascinated by the possibilities of recorded sound. His work deals with real and abstracted soundscapes based on a practice of listening, improvisation, and phonography. Ranging from sonic photographs, studio compositions, instrumental pieces, and improvisations, the resulting pieces are textural explorations of space and time.
As a performer of electronics, computers, handmade instruments, and percussion, he has played with a variety of improvisors including Cor Fuhler, Joe McPhee, Phil Gelb, Todd Reynolds, John Butcher, Mark Dresser, and Pauline Oliveros. His instrumental compositions have included performances by Network for New Music, Ensemble SurPlus, the Boston Sound Collective, and the Brentano String Quartet. He has collaborated frequently with video artists, dancers, and other artists, and for the past ten years has maintained an active collaboration with composer and sound artist Stephan Moore as the duo Evidence.
His work has been presented and broadcast worldwide, including recent presentations at the Kitchen in NYC, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the 2006 Sonic Circuits festival in Washington DC, and the Kulturhaus E-Werk in Frieberg, Germany. Media has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Televaw, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and others. He is currently trying to create an ensemble of solar powered instruments, preferably to be played while cross-country skiing.