About
Michael Early
As a composer, I feel most at home making music at the fuzzy borders between established traditions, and I will happily use any technique or style I can wrap my head or hands around. I am particularly interested in shared spaces between Western concert music and non-notated music, between popular and art song, between acoustic and electronic instruments, and between human beings and the natural world. I have created music for traditional Western orchestras, electronic laptop orchestras, acoustic chamber groups, voice, piano & electronics, solo percussion, mp3 players, and electric guitars.
Designing music around the physicality of particular performers and instruments gets me excited. I have had the pleasure and good fortune to work with many outstanding performers and ensembles, including Kathleen Supové, Samuel Solomon, Benjamin Schwartz, CATCH electric guitar quartet, JACK string quartet, NOW Ensemble, members of New Millennium Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble of London, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. As a performer, I play electric guitar and write music for the duo X10. I occasionally perform and write music with the electronic ensemble Sideband, a collective of composer-performer-programmers. Under the name ThreeAcrePlot I write and record songs for my voice and a variety of instruments.
I enjoy writing, thinking, and talking about music, and recently presented some of my doctoral dissertation work at the popMAC International Conference on Popular Music in Liverpool, UK. Theory is a way for me to make sense of the music that I love and that I make. Teaching is a way to exchange my own experience, study and research with musicians and non-musicians who are also passionate about music. I have taught theory, musicianship, electronic music, and composition both privately and at the college/university level. Since 2011 I teach in the Music Composition MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I give one-on-one instruction in contemporary concert music, electronic music, and songwriting.
I hold degrees in music from Yale University (B.A.), USC Thornton School of Music (M.M.), and Princeton University (Ph.D.) where I was a recipient of the Roger Sessions University Fellowship in Music. I have also received fellowships, awards and grants from ASCAP, the Percussive Arts Society, the OUTPUT guitar festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the MIT Council for the Arts. My music has been performed at the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound in Kitchener, Ontario; the ODC Theater in San Francisco; the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado; the OUTPUT guitar festival in Amsterdam; The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley; Grinnell College in Iowa; Denison University in Ohio; and many venues in New York City including Le Poisson Rouge, Galapagos Art Space, The Flea Theater, 92YTribeca, The Museum of the Moving Image and the MMIX festival.