Aaron Cassidy (born ) is an American
composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.
Etymology and Defi ...
.
Education
Cassidy was born in
Illinois
Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...
.
He received a Bachelor of Music degree, with distinction, from the
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
Bienen School of Music
The Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music is the music and performance arts school of Northwestern University. It is located on Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States.
The school was previously known as the North ...
in
Evanston, Illinois
Evanston ( ) is a city, suburb of Chicago. Located in Cook County, Illinois, United States, it is situated on the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Evanston is north of Downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, Wil ...
, where his main instructors in composition were
Jay Alan Yim
Jay Alan Yim (born April 24, 1958) is an American composer of Chinese American, Chinese descent and recipient of a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Early life and education
Yim was born into a Chinese family in St. Louis, Missouri on April 24, 195 ...
,
Alan Stout, and
Michael Pisaro
Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed over 80 works for a great variety of instrumental combinations, including several pieces for variable in ...
. He went on to study composition with David Felder and Jeffery Stadelman at the
State University of New York at Buffalo
The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1846 ...
where he received a Ph.D. in Composition in 2003. He also participated in masterclass and lessons with composers including
Richard Barrett,
Chaya Czernowin
Chaya Czernowin (Hebrew: חיה צ'רנובין, ; born December 7, 1957) is an Israeli American composer, and Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University.
She is the lead composer at the Schloß Solitude Sommerakademie, a biannu ...
,
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (; born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and ...
,
Jonathan Harvey,
Alvin Lucier
Alvin Augustus Lucier Jr. (May 14, 1931 – December 1, 2021) was an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University in Mi ...
, and
Tristan Murail
Tristan Murail (born 11 March 1947) is a French composer associated with the "spectral" technique of composition. Among his compositions is the large orchestral work ''Gondwana''.
Early life and studies
Murail was born in Le Havre, France. His fa ...
, among others.
Style
Cassidy's music exhibits a radical approach to parametric organisation in composition, especially in his solo works, in a manner that he describes as to do with "decoupling". In works such as the ''ten monophonic miniatures for pianist'', he treats the sound of the pianist's fingers on the keys as a separate parameter in the music, and in this and other pieces he incorporates and integrates a wide range of extended instrumental techniques. He is concerned to explore the possibilities of fracturing between different musical parameters, and to defamiliarise aspects of traditional
performance practice
Historically informed performance (also referred to as period performance, authentic performance, or HIP) is an approach to the performance of classical music, which aims to be faithful to the approach, manner and style of the musical era in whic ...
. Intellectual influences upon his music include the work of
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,[Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...]
and
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari ( , ; 30 April 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, ...
. His work is sometimes associated with the
New Complexity
New Complexity is a label principally applied to composers seeking a "complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material".
Origins
Though often atonal, highly abstract ...
.
Cassidy's work has been performed by a wide range of leading contemporary music specialists, including
ELISION Ensemble
The ELISION Ensemble (often referred to as simply ELISION) is a chamber ensemble specialising in contemporary classical music, concentrating on the creation and presentation of new works. The ensemble comprises a core of around 20 virtuoso musici ...
, Ensemble SurPlus, the
Ictus Ensemble
ICTUS is a Belgian orchestra, founded by in 1994, specialising in contemporary classical music. It is based in Brussels where it is involved in frequent collaborations with the contemporary dance choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
The o ...
, the
Kairos Quartet, Quatuor Diotima,
ensemble recherche
The ensemble recherche is a German classical music ensemble of nine soloists, especially dedicated to contemporary music. Founded in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1985, they premiered some 500 works. They were awarded the Schneider-Schott Music Prize ...
, Mieko Kanno,
Garth Knox,
Ian Pace
Ian Geoffrey Pace (born 1968) is a British pianist. Pace studied at Chetham's School of Music, The Queen's College, Oxford and the Juilliard School in New York City, New York. His main teacher was the Hungarian pianist György Sándor.
Repertoi ...
, Christopher Redgate,
Carl Rosman
Carl Rosman is an Australian clarinettist, singer and conductor.
Rosman studied with Phillip Miechel in Melbourne, then with Peter Jenkin at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He has performed in Europe, Asia, Australasia and both North and So ...
, and Peter Veale, at many venues and festivals including the
Gaudeamus International Music Week (where he was a Jurors Prize nominee, in 2002 and 2004), the
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (also known by the acronym HCMF, stylised since 2006 as the lowercase hcmf//) is a new music festival held annually in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. Since its foundation in 1978, it has featured ...
, the
Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, the Bienal Internacional de Musica y Tecnología (Mexico City), the Samtida Musik Stockholm, the festival June In Buffalo, and the
ISCM
The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) is a music organization that promotes contemporary classical music.
The organization was established in Salzburg in 1922 as Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM) following the ...
World Music Days (Zagreb 2005), as well as being broadcast by radio stations in Britain, France, Germany and Austria.
Writings
Cassidy has also written articles for ''New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century'' and is currently preparing an article on the compositional pedagogy of
Michael Finnissy
Michael Peter Finnissy (born 17 March 1946) is an English composer, pianist, and pedagogue. An immensely prolific composer, his music is "notable for its dramatic urgency and expressive immediacy".
Although he rejects the label, he is often r ...
. He also works as a conductor and organist, and acts as conductor and pianist for Augenmusik, a Buffalo-based ensemble specializing in the performance of graphic scores and works in
open form, frequently for unusual instrumentations. He has also worked recently as a CD producer, particularly for EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble in their discs of the music of Michael Finnissy,
Christopher Fox, and
Howard Skempton, which were released on the
NMC label.
In 2005, Cassidy was appointed to the composition faculty of the
Bienen School of Music
The Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music is the music and performance arts school of Northwestern University. It is located on Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States.
The school was previously known as the North ...
at
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.
Charte ...
, where he taught and was also responsible for organizing the New Music Northwestern concert series. He was formerly a visiting assistant professor of music at
Buffalo State College
The State University of New York College at Buffalo (colloquially referred to as Buffalo State College, SUNY Buffalo State, Buffalo State, or simply Buff State) is a public college in Buffalo, New York. It is part of the State University of Ne ...
.
He joined the faculty of the
University of Huddersfield
, mottoeng = Thus not for you alone
, established = 1825 – Huddersfield Science and Mechanics' Institute1992 – university status
, type = Public
, endowment = £2.47 million (2015)
, chancellor = George W. Buckley
, vice_chancel ...
in 2007 as senior lecturer in composition.
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cassidy, Aaron
American male composers
21st-century American composers
1976 births
Living people
Musicians from Illinois
Bienen School of Music alumni
University at Buffalo alumni
Northwestern University faculty
Buffalo State College faculty
Academics of the University of Huddersfield
21st-century American male musicians