Princeton Sound Kitchen Presents
Dither and Mivos
Performing New Works by:
Leila Adu
Andy Akiho
Quinn Collins
Cenk Ergun
Amanda Feery
Wally Gunn
Jeff Snyder
Performed by:
Dither Guitar Quartet
Mivos String Quartet
Location: Taplin Auditorium in Fine Hall
Ticketing: Free admission
Date: Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Start time: 8:00 pm
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PSK presents Dither Guitar Quartet and Mivos String Quartet, with guests, performing works by Princeton composers Leila Adu, Andy Akiho, Quinn Collins, Cenk Ergun, Amanda Feery, Wally Gunn, and Jeff Snyder on Tuesday, February 18th, 2014 at 8:00pm. Streaming here.
Dan Trueman, Director
Michael Pratt, Resident Conductor
DITHER GUITAR QUARTET
MIVOS STRING QUARTET
YUMI TAMASHIRO, marimba
IAN ROSENBAUM, marimba
SUSAN ALCORN, pedal steel guitar
SIGAN MAGEN, harp
PROGRAM
JEFF SNYDER
Substratum
Mivos Quartet with Susan Alcorn, pedal steel
LEILA ADU-GILMORE
Alyssum
Mivos Quartet with Sivan Magen, harp
CENK ERGÜN
8 Voices
Mivos Quartet
ANDY AKIHO
LIgNEouS 1, 2 & 3
Mivos Quartet with Yumi Tamashiro, marimba, and Ian David Rosenbaum, marimba
- INTERMISSION -
WALLY GUNN
Archaean Eon
Dither with Jason Treuting, drum set
AMANDA FEERY
The Little Woman Wanted Noise
Dither
QUINN COLLINS
Near the Knuckle
Dither
JEFF SNYDER
Substratum
Mivos Quartet with Susan Alcorn, pedal steel
Substratum (2013) came to be through my association with Susan Alcorn, for whom the piece was written. She performed as the pedal steel guitarist in my electro-country band, Owen Lake and Tragic Loves, and we started talking about how interesting it would be to write a concert music piece that features this unique instrument. Almost exclusively associated with the country and western genre, the pedal steel guitar dates from the mid 1950s, when slide guitarists began to add pedals (similar to those on a harp) to adjust the tuning of their open strings. The instrument that Susan plays is a descendant of this tradition, expanded from 10 strings to 12, and from a small handful of pedals to 8 foot pedals and 5 levers operated by the knees, giving an unusual amount of control over pitch for a slide guitar. It’s one of my favorite instruments, and Susan is an incredible player who took on the challenge of learning a difficult piece and basically trying something that has never been done before. The instrumentation is something of a reference to the traditional country music pairing of the pedal steel guitar with twin fiddles, often trading back and forth between who embellishes the verses of a song. It also reflects my desire to write a piece for the Mivos Quartet, who have been playing the crap out of beautiful and challenging music for several years. The piece itself evokes a kind of non-human internal logic. It aims at a structure that belies an anthropomorphic or emotional characterization. I imagine capturing the thoughts of tree roots finding their way in the earth, winding around their siblings and the natural impediments to their path, searching for water. Or possibly the hive mind of an ant colony busily creating a network of tunnels. The piece seeks to look under the surface at those natural processes, tensions and harmonies in the systems that surround us or exist wholly indifferent to us.
LEILA ADU-GILMORE
Alyssum
Mivos Quartet with Sivan Magen, harp
for my mother, Alison
If anyone was ever deserving of a piece of being written in her honor, it is my mum. Alyssum is the starry, white plant that grows in rocky beds: it sounds like her name, moreover, hardy and beautiful are qualities that suit her. Of course, like most mothers, she took care of my needs and went through, in our case, a particularly horrid birth process. Aside from that, my mother seems to have befallen many a tragedy; her spirit, however, rather than being dampened by this, has remained strong, calm and relatively light-hearted! In the past few years, an earthquake destroyed the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, in which she still lives and we found that she has had increasing brain damage, due to Alzheimer’s. Mum’s darkly sharp wit interpreted me writing this piece for her now, as being whilst she was still compos mentis (Latin: of sound mind). In fact, she is right, I wanted to write Alyssum while she could fully appreciate it¾though she stays in touch with new arts and loves music so much that I imagine she will get a good bit of enjoyment out of it yet. Mum recently sent me an email with a YouTube video of the scene from Pedro Almaldovar’s film Talk To Her, where Caetano Veloso sings Cucurrucucú Paloma: I had been really getting into Antonio Jobim around the same time. Therefore, upon finding our shared love of bossanova, I decided to add the theme of common tones to my cantus firmus, as well as harmonies descending by semi-tone and bossa rhythms, especially in the final section. The high A could show my mother’s enduring spirit, and her initials - Alison Barbara Gilmore - are heard as a theme. She loves nature and the sea, which she lives by; accordingly, there are themes and expression directions of waves, pools and waterfalls. Finally, thanks to Sivan Magen and Mivos String Quartet for indulging me in this gift to my mum!
CENK ERGÜN
8 Voices
Mivos Quartet
8 Voices was originally composed for the vocal ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, and was premiered in Princeton last year. The music is a series of reiterations of a single chord, interrupted by silences. As I was listening to the rehearsal recordings of the vocal version, I heard people talking, coughing, and walking around in the rehearsal space. These sounds were especially pronounced during the silences, and I liked the effect they created. For the string quartet version, I wanted to see what happened if I replaced the silences with a kind of composed “noise.”
ANDY AKIHO
LIgNEouS 1, 2 & 3
Mivos Quartet with Yumi Tamashiro, marimba, and Ian David Rosenbaum, marimba
LIgNEouS, adjective: of the nature of or resembling wood (from the Oxford Dictionary).Ingredients: string quartet, 5 octave marimba, extremely large rubber band, moleskin-tipped birch mallets, & perseverance.Disclaimer: NO MARIMBAS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS COMPOSITION.
LIgNEouS 1 was commissioned by John and Astrid Baumgardner for the 2010 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and LIgNEouS 2 was commissioned by Yumi Tamashiro in 2012. These works are dedicated to Ian Rosenbaum, Yumi Tamashiro, and all of my inspiring friends of the Yale Percussion Group and the Manhattan School Percussion Department who inspired me to write for marimba. Tonight’s performance is a world premiere of the LIgNEouS Suite. Movements 2 and 3 are world premieres, and Movement 1 has been shortened and modified from the original version to work with the entire piece. The order in which the pieces are played can vary: tonight, the suite will be performed in reverse order. In the spring of 2010, I attended an exhibit of composer and architect Iannis Xenakis’s original architecture sketches at The Drawing Center in NYC. When I left, I was inspired to sketch out a pitch world with color-penciled “LI-NE—S” by connecting vertical rows of chromatic pitches, expanding the full range of the 5-octave marimba, with geometric diagonal lines and collapsing triangles. These visually linear note combinations became the foundational scales for the piece. Then, I intuitively worked at the marimba, improvising on these scales, and these improvisations became the fundamental building blocks, or rhythmic and melodic cells, of this work. “LIgNEouS” means “made, consisting of, or resembling wood.” This title was chosen because the marimba, violin, viola, and cello are all primarily made of wood. Also, the sticks/mallet shafts really bring out the wooden sound world that I was striving for in the marimba. I decided to only use marimba mallet shafts, without the mallet heads, in order to capture an extremely woody sound and to articulate the highest overtones. I also wanted to use industrial timbres in addition to the melodic bars, accomplished through glissandos and strikes to the metallic resonators. To mimic snap (‘Bartók’) pizzicatos, a string technique produced by vertically snapping/plucking a string to rebound off the fingerboard, I used an extremely large rubber band on the low D of the 5-octave marimba. Finally, the string parts feature non-pitched scratch tones, a technique adopted from Xenakis's string quartets.
- INTERMISSION -
WALLY GUNN
Archaean Eon
Dither with Jason Treuting, drum set
The Archaeon Eon began 4,000 million years ago and ended 2,500 million years ago. That’s 1,500 million years. This piece is only 6 minutes, but hopes to illustrate a glimpse of explosive volcanism and exponential reproduction of single-celled organisms; events which define that time. Many thanks to Dither and Jason Treuting for premiering this piece tonight.
AMANDA FEERY
The Little Woman Wanted Noise
Dither
The title of the piece comes from a children’s story book of the same name. A woman, who lives in a cacophonous city between a shoemakers and a printers, then inherits a farm and moves there, but cannot sleep for the silence. So she buys a pig, a dog, a rooster, and a “rattley bang car with a loud horn”, which she drives to the loudest place she can find; an orphanage, where she adopts two boys … that sort of thing. “And the little woman had no rest. But she had peace of mind.” I can relate to the headcase protagonist of our story, not in the sense of adopting loud orphans, but in the sense of the peace of mind ‘not silence’ brings me. In a relatively silent environment I tend to latch onto sounds that are constant, but come in and out of aural focus¾anything from a refrigerator motor to a humming streetlight bulb. The idea around this piece was to establish little “constants,” little refrigerator motors at work, sometimes in the foreground or background, but always chattering away, smoothing over any dead air.
QUINN COLLINS
Near the Knuckle
Dither
Near the Knuckle is about acoustic beating, fuzzy points of focus, and hazy memories. It was written for Dither in 2013, and this evening’s performance is the premiere.
ABOUT THE PERFORMERS
Susan Alcorn is a Baltimore, Maryland-based composer and musician who has received international recognition as an innovator of the pedal steel guitar, an instrument whose sound is commonly associated with country and western music. Having absorbed the technique of C&W pedal steel and refined it to a virtuosic level, her original music reveals the influence of free jazz, 20th Century classical music, Indian ragas, folk and indigenous traditions, as well as other musics of the world. The UK Guardian describes her music as “beautiful, glassy and liquid, however far she strays from pulse and conventional harmony.” In addition to frequent tours throughout North America and Europe, Susan has performed in the UK at the London Festival of Experimental Music, the On The Outside Festival in Newcastle, and the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra Improvisation Festival; Cafe Oto and The Vortex in London; in France at the Musique Action Festival in Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, Ateliers Tampon and Instants Chavires in Paris; in Germany at the Leipzig JazzTage and with the ICI Ensemble in Munich; The Stone, New York at CBGBs, and Issue Project Room ; Rome at Il Continiere; Israel at Levontin 7 and Uganda; and at Arsenic and Cave 12 in Switzerland. Though mostly a solo performer, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, the late Peter Kowald, Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Maggie Nicols, Joe Giardullo, Joe McPhee, Mike Cooper, Lê Quan Ninh, Ellen Fullman, Evan Parker, Michael Formanek, Ellery Eskelin, and John Butcher. New releases include the solo album Touch This Moment (Uma Sounds) and Mirage with Ellery Eskelin and Michael Formanek (Clean Feed).
Dither, a New York based electric guitar quartet, is dedicated to an eclectic mix of experimental repertoire which spans composed music, improvisation, and electronic manipulation. Formed in 2007, the quartet has performed across the United States and abroad, presenting new commissions, original compositions, improvisations, multimedia works, and large guitar ensemble pieces. The quartet’s members are Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore and Gyan Riley. Dither has worked with a wide range of artists, including Eve Beglarian, Elliott Sharp, David Lang, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Lois V. Vierk, Larry Polansky and Phill Niblock. Past performances include the Performa Biennial, The MATA Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Amsterdam Electric Guitar Heaven Festival, Hong Kong’s Fringe Theater, and the Bang on a Can Marathon. Dither produces their annual Extravaganza, a raucous festival of creative music and art, which has been called an “official concert on the edge” by The New Yorker. Their critically acclaimed debut album was released on Henceforth Records in 2010.
Praised by the press as “a magician” (New York’s WQXR), of “unheard of depth of colors, range of expression and rhetorical flow” (American Record Guide), Sivan Magen is the only Israeli to have ever won the International Harp Contest in Israel, a recent winner of the Pro Musicis International Award and the 2012 Award Winner of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Recent performances include recitals in NY (Merkin Hall, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall), London (Wigmore Hall), Amsterdam (Musiekgebouw) and solo appearances in the US, South America, Europe and Israel including the world premiere of Haim Permont's Aviv concerto with the Israel Philharmonic. Debut performances for the 2013-2014 season will include concerto appearances with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony, and the Vienna Chamber Orchestra at the Vienna Konzerthaus. He has also been invited by Carnegie Hall to return for a recital in fall 2014 to celebrate the American release of his new solo CD for Linn records, Fantasien. This recital will also include the world premiere of the Carnegie Hall commissioned Fantasy for Solo Harp by emerging American composer Sean Shepherd. An avid chamber musician, Mr. Magen has appeared throughout Europe, Israel and the US, at the Marlboro, Kuhmo, Giverny, and Jerusalem International Chamber Music festivals, and with Musicians from Marlboro. He is a founding member of the award winning Israeli Chamber Project and of Trio Tre Voci with flutist Marina Piccinini and violist Kim Kashkashian, and has collaborated with artists such as Nobuko Imai, Tatjana Masurenko, Shmuel Ashkenazi, Gary Hoffman, Michel Letiec, Charles Neidich, Emmanuel Pahud, and members of the Guarneri and Juilliard Quartets. This past season he released his new CD with the Israeli Chamber Project for Azica Records as well as an all-Britten CD Still Falls the Rain with tenor Nicholas Phan for Avie (listed in The New York Times’ “Best recordings of 2012”); both to great critical acclaim. Next season will see the release of his second solo CD for Linn Records as well as a recording with Tre Voci for ECM. His performance of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro is featured on Marlboro’s 60th Anniversary CD.
The Mivos Quartet, an “accomplished, admirably broad-minded young string quartet” (The New York Times), is devoted to performing the works of contemporary composers, presenting new music to diverse audiences. Since the quartet’s beginnings in 2008 they have performed the works of emerging and established international composers who represent varied aesthetics of contemporary classical composition. Mivos is invested in commissioning and premiering new music for string quartet, particularly in a context of close collaboration with composers over extended time-periods. In the upcoming 2013-2014 season, Mivos will collaborate on new works with Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Dan Blake (Jerome Commission), Mark Barden (Wien Modern Festival Commission), Richard Carrick (Fromm Commission), Eric Wubbels (CMA commission) and Kate Soper. Mivos also regularly performs the works of composers including Alex Mincek, Helmut Lachenmann, Anna Clyne, Wolfgang Rihm, Samson Young, Luke DuBois, Philip Glass, Felipe Lara, Mario Diaz de Leon, and Tristan Perich. Mivos has appeared at venues including The Guggenheim Museum, Kennedy Center, Zankel Hall, MoMA, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette, and on concert series including Wien Modern (Vienna, Austria), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), Concerti Aperitivo (Udine, Italy), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (China), Edgefest (Ann Arbor,MI), and Aldeburgh Music (UK), where Mivos was invited to work with the Arditti Quartet and Helmut Lachenmann. Mivos returned to Aldeburgh Music in January 2013 for a two-week residency, where they performed two concerts and recorded their debut solo album, Reappearances, featuring works by Alex Mincek, David Franzson, Felipe Lara, and Wolfgang Rihm (Carrier Records, Nov. 2013 release). Mivos was one of five groups selected for the Young Ensembles Fellowship at the 2012 Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, DE), where they were awarded a Fellowship Prize for Interpretation and invited back for the next Darmstadt Festival in 2014. In addition to their work as interpreters, Mivos is committed to collaborating with guest artists, exploring multi-media projects involving live video and electronics, creating original compositions and arrangements for the quartet, and performing improvised music. Mivos’ work as improvisers has led to collaborations with artists including Dan Blake, Ned Rothenberg, Chris Speed, Timucin Sahin and Nate Wooley. Mivos has made several recordings in the free-jazz/improv realm, including Ned Rothenberg’s acclaimed Quintet for Clarinet and Strings on John Zorn’s Tzadik label (“played with spontaneity and dexterity” -The Strad Magazine), and Bojan Vuletic’s Atemwende, with trumpeter Nate Wooley. Mivos is also active in education, and looks forward to upcoming residencies at Princeton University and the Shanghai Conservatory. Past engagements have included workshops at CUNY Graduate Center, Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, SUNY Fredonia, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai Conservatory (China), University Malaya (Malaysia), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Hong Kong Art Center, and MIAM University in Istanbul (Turkey). The quartet also runs the annual Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize, established to support the work of emerging and mid-career composers and to encourage continued interest in new compositions for string quartet. The winning composer, selected from over one hundred and fifty applicants, receives a performance of their work in New York City on the Mivos Quartet concert season and a cash prize. In 2013, Mivos initiated a second competition in a similiar format for composers of Chinese descent, called the ICreation Prize. The members of Mivos are: violinists Olivia De Prato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Mariel Roberts, each of whom are recognized individually as extraordinary voices in contemporary music.
Praised for his “excellent” and “precisely attuned” performances by The New York Times, percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum has developed a musical breadth far beyond his years. He made his Kennedy Center debut in 2009 and later that year garnered a special prize created for him at the Salzburg International Marimba Competition. Last season, Mr. Rosenbaum joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two program as only the second percussionist they have selected in their history. Mr. Rosenbaum has performed with the acclaimed Sō Percussion group and has appeared at the Norfolk, Yellow Barn, Chamber Music Northwest and Music@Menlo festivals. Highlights of the 2013-2014 season include a tour of Southern California performing Christopher Cerrone’s Memory Palace, a recital at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. and a solo performance on the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s New Music in the Kaplan Penthouse series. Continuing his passionate advocacy for contemporary music, this season Mr. Rosenbaum will premiere new works for percussion by Andy Akiho, David Crowell, Tawnie Olson and Paola Prestini. Mr. Rosenbaum is a member of Sandbox Percussion, Le Train Bleu, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Novus NY and Time Travelers. He has recorded for the Bridge, Innova and Naxos labels and is on the faculty of the Dwight School in Manhattan. Mr. Rosenbaum endorses Vic Firth sticks and mallets.
Yumi Tamashiro trained as a pianist but was “converted” to percussion, drawn by the allure of teaching high school drumline. And it was her undergraduate 20th Century Music History class that turned her on to contemporary music. Soon after participating in a masterclass with Sō Percussion, a group based in Brooklyn, NY, she fell in love. Ms. Tamashiro has performed at the Banff Center of Arts, The Kennedy Center, Symphony Space, The Stone, The Bohemian National Hall, and Le Poisson Rouge among others. She has performed with a range of projects including Carnegie Neighborhood Series, Ecstatic Music Festival and Make Music New York. Her repertoire includes works by Elliot Carter, Steve Reich, Jacob Druckman, Karlheintz Stockhausen, Andy Akiho, Roshanne Etezady, Iannis Xenakis, Michio Kitazume, and Jason Treuting. Yumi has had the privilege of performing with groups such as Nexus, Opera Moderne, and Sō Percussion. Rooted in New York City, Yumi has become a member of many ensembles: Mobius Percussion Quartet, Ensemble sans Maître, and Tempus Continuum Ensemble. With Mobius Percussion Quartet, a NYC based percussion quartet, she is commissioning a new work from composer Jason Treuting.
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Leila Adu-Gilmore is the Wellington Orchestra’s Composer in Residence for 2014. Based in New York, she will write a large-scale piece for a touring orchestral performance in September 2015. Leila has released four acclaimed albums and performed her original songs and improvisations of voice accompanied by piano alongside international artists, at festivals and venues in the UK, mainland Europe, the US, Australasia, Russia and Indonesia. Her latest releases were recorded for RAI/Tracce, the Italian National Radio label. Leila has been voted as MTV Iggy’s Artist of the Week, performed on the BBC World Service, composed and produced a documentary soundtrack for the BBC Knowledge TV channel and the NZ Film Festival. Leila completed post-graduate studies in composition at Victoria University of Wellington, where she wrote pieces for gamelan and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. She is currently a doctoral fellow in music composition at Princeton University and has recently composed for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Brentano String Quartet and Sō Percussion.
Described as “mold-breaking” and “vital” by The New York Times and as “a young composer to watch” by The LA Times, Andy Akiho is an eclectic and contemporary composer/performer whose interests run from steel pan to traditional classical music. Recent engagements include a commission by Carnegie Hall premiered by Ensemble ACJW, a world premiere commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, a performance with the LA Philharmonic, a tour in Taiwan, and three shows at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, featuring original compositions. His rhythmic compositions touch a wide spectrum of listeners and continue to increase in recognition: selected from an initial pool of over 500 applicants, Akiho won the grand prize for the 2011 Make Music National Composition Competition hosted by the Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird. Other recent awards include the 2011 Woods Chandler Memorial Prize, a 2011 Music Alumni Award, and the 2010 Horatio Parker Award at the Yale School of Music, a 2009 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, a 2008 Brian M. Israel Prize, and three ASCAP Plus Awards. His 2011 debut CD No One To Know One on innova Records features innovative compositions that pose intricate rhythms and exotic timbres around his primary instrument, the steel pan. A graduate of the University of South Carolina (BM, performance), the Manhattan School of Music (MM, contemporary performance), and the Yale School of Music (MM, composition), Andy is currently a graduate student at Princeton University. andyakiho.com
Quinn Collins is a third year student in composition at Princeton University.
Cenk Ergün is a composer and improviser based in New York. His music has been performed by artists such as Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Laboratorium, and Joan Jeanrenaud. As an improviser, he performs electronics in groups with Alvin Curran, Jason Treuting, and Jeff Snyder. Venues that have featured Ergün's music include New York's Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, The Roulette, The Stone; Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw, Zurich's Tonhalle, and Istanbul's Babylon. Some events Ergün has participated in are Gaudeamus Music Week, MATA Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, WNYC's New Sounds Live, Peak Performances at Montclair University, Stanford Lively Arts, and San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. Records Ergün appears on include The Art Of The Fluke with Alvin Curran and Sō Percussion's Cage 100 Bootleg Series. His first solo composition record, Nana, will be released in 2014. Ergün's music has been described as “haunting”, “ominously throbbing” (The New York Times), “psychedelically meditative” (New Music Box), and showing “conceptual rigor” (The Wire).
Amanda Feery keeps fortune cookie-sized slips of paper and poorly labeled audio files around her desk and computer, which she eventually sews together to make a piece. Through her musical studies she has met and worked with inspiring teachers and peers in the realms of composition, improvisation, theatre, and film. Current work includes a vocal/multimedia work based on the diary entries of Donald Crowhurst, and Spells from the Ice Age, an EP of improvisations recorded on neglected pianos. www.amandafeery.com
Wally Gunn is an Australian composer living and working in New York. He writes concert music, rock music, and music for theater, film and visual art and is currently a doctoral fellow at Princeton University.
Jeff Snyder is a composer, improviser and instrument-designer living in Princeton, New Jersey, and active in the New York City area. As founder and lead designer of Snyderphonics, Jeff designs and builds unusual electronic musical instruments. His creations include the Manta, which is played by over 150 musicians around the world; the JD-1 Keyboard/Sequencer, which was a custom commission, and the custom analog modular synthesizer on which he regularly performs. Jeff is a member of the experimental electronic duo exclusiveOr, the avant jazz group The Federico Ughi Quartet, improvisatory noise trio The Mizries, and laptop ensemble Sideband. He fronts the band Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves as his electro-country alter-ego, Owen Lake. He also composes alternate-reality early music for an ensemble of his invented instruments. In 2009, Jeff co-founded an experimental music record label, Carrier Records, which continues to release strange and exciting experimental music. In 2011, he received a doctorate with distinction in music composition from Columbia University. He is currently an associate research scholar of electronic music at Princeton University, and the director of PLOrk , the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.