Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England (October 15, 1962), and studied there as a Choral Scholar at Clare College. He earned his Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Iowa where he studied with Kenneth Gaburo and began work on publishing the Harry Partch archives, now completed after 15 years. Blackburn's book, Enclosure Three, won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He has been the Senior Program Director for the American Composers Forum since 1991 and continues to compose, build sound-sculptures, perform, and write about things like Partch, Vietnamese music, and the use of sound in public art. He runs the innova record label and produces two weekly iTunes podcasts: Alive and Composing, the Wonderful World of Innova, and the NEA-funded Measure For Measure: New Music, New Thoughts. He received a 2003 Bush Artist Fellowship to begin building a sound park in Belize as well as construct an art-house there, Kumquat Cottage.

ARTIST STATEMENT
For thousands of years, architecture has been described as “frozen music.” I want to melt those edges and reinvigorate the use of sound in public art; to make musique concrète with a mixer and trowel; to further the practice of listening; to make a camera obscura for the mind’s ear — by subtly activating the acoustic environment and building magical resonant spaces: chirping stairs, fluttering walls, singing wires, throbbing sewers… Music with some assembly required.

RESUME

Address: 2207 Edgebrook Ave, St. Paul, MN 55119, U.S.A.

Telephone: (651) 714-4963 Home/Cell, (651) 251-2823 Work,

(651) 291-7978 FAX

E-mail: pblackburn (at) composersforum.org or PhilipBla (at) aol.com

EDUCATION

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STATEMENT

It is hard to escape from music. We spend more time filtering out sounds then we do being aware of them. Result: more aural clutter, more environmental pollution, more insensitivity to others and ourselves. How can I help myself and others practice listening and reclaim our soundscape? When is "Composition" "Meditation?"


I compose to make us aware of our own composing: How we live, choose, arrange, experience, perform and develop our own sound world. This practice generally involves the public (rather than trained new-music professionals), takes place in non-arts venues (rather than the historically- and architecturally-loaded context of the concert hall), and seeks the simplest means of generating the most richly-complex polyphonies and group dynamics. I compose community directly (it is not a target of "outreach" for me). Passersby, virtuosos, children and adults participate in my musical world on a level footing.


Fun, seductive, subversive, interactive. These are the qualities I seek in my compositions (and they are indeed structured compositions rather than improvisations or sculptural objects). They may bypass conventional means but are nonetheless disciplined. This artistic direction also requires entrepreneurship, since I generally operate outside the musical industry.


How does experimental music, that most esoteric of art forms, go down with the uninitiated? My recent works have been witnessed by many thousands of people; some have personally expressed their joyful astonishment, kids go out of their way to play my sound sculptures every day after school, a woman from Paris sat by my Nevada desert piece for three days, five people were in tears after a performance of my organ piece, a hushed crowd at the Minnesota State Fair gathered for a work celebrating junk food… Cerebral, sometimes silly, my works require no training to appreciate but I hope they elicit a direct response and provoke further inquiry.

I have long fantasized about creating musical experiences that are so fleeting and personal that they are essentially undocumentable and non-transportable: "You really should have been there." My success in this direction however means that work samples cannot convey remotely the same message. The music is generally conceived for specific places for a particular audience, and is not intended to travel or enter the standard repertoire of anything.


My philosophical direction, of course, in no way diminishes the more mainstream tradition and academic musical circles. I maintain a strong involvement in those but simply choose to pursue my own path (albeit not so far from a Pauline Oliveros or Maryanne Amacher world). I find the more I let go, the more my own compositional voice and concerns take shape and follow a path without the usual models. Originality, if I have any of it, is a natural result rather than a goal.


The categories of sound sculptor, sound artist, performer and composer are likewise blurred in my case. I compose more than sound sculptors do; I make more instruments than composers typically do; I perform alongside others in my own compositions without controlling the specific outcome… And yet I have tried to anticipate the occasion and stipulate the kinds of musical interactions that will take place (if everyone agrees to the rules of the score). Sometimes there are written instructions (a score, like the rules of a game); and sometimes simply instruments in space for you to play (the space itself is the score). Perhaps I am a ritual designer.

 

BIO

Philip Blackburn started composing at the age of 16, writing experimental works for mixed ensembles and working with a simple electronic tape studio. He studied privately with Anthony Milner and Bryan Kelly of the Royal College of Music in London. He was a co-founder of the Oxford composers' collective Soundpool and developed a number of improvised, notated, and electronic works which were performed in Oxford and London. He began studies in experimental music, cognitive studies, phenomenology, linguistics, and theatre with Kenneth Gaburo in San Diego in 1979.

Subsequently he attended Cambridge University on a Choral Scholarship to Clare College, where he organized the weekly New Music Workshops and studied with Robin Holloway. Works at this time included AIR: Air, Canary, New Ground for Clarinet and Piano (scheduled for CD release) and Come o'er the Burn, Bessy for choir, which have received numerous performances in the U.S. and Europe.

In 1985 Blackburn moved to Iowa to continue studies with Gaburo where he began to involve non-trained musicians in his compositions and investigate the notion of composition as meditation; his Ph.D. thesis, Minding Steps and Other Matters, described several of his site-specific performances/group meditative activities. These were the first in an on-going series of verbal instruction scores, collectively known as Music to Play, used to generate musical performances by any number of participants, regardless of "musical" training.

His installation in collaboration with Don Engstrom, Spirit maps; A Learnings Project, which relates to the spiritual experiences of those affected by HIV, was commissioned by Arts Over AIDS and took place at Intermedia Arts Gallery, Minneapolis in June, 1994 with subsequent showings at the Johnson County Museum, Iowa (during the November 1994, Inqueery, InTheory, InDeed conference). Other collaborations include At the Crimson Tree with choreographer Marylee Hardenbergh. P.P.S., a work for Organ and Tape in memoriam Kenneth Gaburo, commissioned by Gary Verkade, was premiered during the Society of Composers Inc. National Conference in April, 1995, and is relased on Winded (innova 524)

In March, 1996 Blackburn was composer-in-residence at CSPS New Music Festival in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, working with volunteers at the Rapids AIDS Project, students at an alternative High School, and students at Cornell College to present an evening of his works. That month he also organized the largest gathering of Vietnamese musicians outside Vietnam for the 6-week World of Vietnamese Music Festival, which included 23 concerts and 17 educational events. In May he realized a dream to study with more than 30 experimental instrument builders in Australia and Western Samoa under the auspices of a Jerome Travel Study Grant, and spent 7 weeks collecting ideas for his Sonic Playground concept. He is now working on a sound park in the Belize rainforest.

For 20 years, Blackburn worked on producing a series of publications about the extraordinary American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974). Enclosures takes the form of two videotapes, three CDsets, a DVD, and a gargantuan scrapbook, all intended to let the much-misunderstood Harry speak for himself. The series has received great acclaim from such journals as: The Village Voice, LA Times, The Wire, San Francisco Examiner, Fanfare, The American Record Guide, CMJ, Torso, Music and Letters, Spin, and Time Out-London. He is the producer of The Henry Brant Collection on innova, now up to 5 issues, featuring the spatial compositions of one of America's most extraordinary composers.

Blackburn is also a papermaker, woodworker and designer of experimental musical instruments. He continues to work with the medium of tape and organize non-exclusive, participatory performance events which explore the notion of composition as meditation. He is designing and building a prototype Sonic Playground as well as permanent spaces for the appreciation of sound in the natural environment. In his work with choreographers, videographers, and visual artists, Blackburn interrogates the nature of collaboration: the dissolution of the artists' independent roles, a complete sharing of each other's domain.

 

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