Composer’s Statement – Kevin Wilson
I am a composer, performer, and researcher dedicated to understanding and exploring new and old musical, aural, and artistic phenomena. Having studied music, art, and creative writing since childhood, I began writing, improvising, recording and producing music and multimedia during adolescence. Attending Brown University, I first composed algorithmic electronic music possessing self-similarity and other principles inherited from concurrent studies of logic, science, and music theory. Some of these early algorithmic works, in conjunction with ambient and atmospheric works, I would utilize as part of a live score for Tod and I, an original multimedia puppet show.
This work, in addition to successes with traditional scored composition, would propel me into pursuing a degree in electronic music and multimedia, studying the history and principles of sound synthesis while devising new tools and means for the composition and performance of acoustic, electronic, and electro-acoustic music and multimedia. Through my studies I have attempted to achieve a balance and to develop an interplay between artistic and scientific capacity, and I look forward to future academic, intellectual and collaborative opportunities to explore and understand sound, music, art, psychology, and cognitive experience.
A number of my recent musical works have formed out of a careful study of and passion for the MAX/MSP/Jitter programming environment, in which I develop live instruments and synthesis methods as well as real-time compositional tools that blur the line between performer and composer, composed and improvised, purpose and disorder, sense and structure in music and art. I created the scores for a series of recent compositions written for small ensembles of acoustic instruments algorithmically using this program, and I am eager to study increasingly advanced methods in computer-assisted composition and to link creative development between traditional and new instruments and approaches.
While I hope to continue to pursue music composition as a primary artistic pursuit, I am also actively engaged in different and sometimes interlocking forms of media and art, specifically, sound installation, sound art, poetry, performance, and writing both creative and research-based. Some of my recent work links written and spoken word with musical forms, recognizing a connection between linguistic and musical cognition. Considered globally, I hope to pursue graduate study that explores more deeply both the sonic and conceptual possibilities that new technology and an experimental approach can actualize.
My experience as a student and as an instructor, teaching kids how to use computers to make art, music and multimedia, has lead me to realize the apparent worth and creative potential inherent as much in the act of teaching as in making music and art. I look forward to meeting, interacting with, and learning from experienced professors, teachers, and classmates, who are engaging artistic and academic goals and visions that contrast, challenge, and inspire my own.