Sarah Belle Reid & David Rosenboom
Biography Sarah Belle Reid & David Rosenboom
Sarah Belle Reid
is a performer-composer who plays trumpet, modular synthesizer, and an ever-growing collection of handcrafted electronic instruments. Her unique musical voice explores the intersections between contemporary classical music, experimental and interactive electronics, visual arts, noise music, and improvisation. Often praised for her ability to transport audience members through vivid sonic adventures, Reid's sonic palette has been described as ranging from "graceful" and "danceable" all the way to "silk-falling-through-space," and "pit-full-of-centipedes" (San Francisco Classical Voice). Her debut album for trumpet and interactive electronics, "Underneath and Sonder," was released on pfMENTUM in October, 2019.
When watching Sarah Belle Reid perform live, one quickly notices that her trumpet is also unusual—the blinking lights and colorful wires attached to her horn are part of an electronic sensor-based interface she co-designed, called MIGSI. Reid was inspired to build MIGSI as a way of integrating her passion for technology, trumpet, and improvisation. She has been gaining international recognition for the work since it's initial development in 2015: “Reid has greatly extended the possibilities of the humble trumpet into new territory by the application of innovative sensing technology and sound processing.” (Sequenza 21). She frequently performs, leads workshops, and lectures at notable festivals, institutions, and conferences around the world, such as Moogfest, Stanford University, and the International Conference of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME).
Reid's compositional practice draws influence from trumpeter-improviser Wadada Leo Smith (with whom she worked closely with while attending Calarts) and sound artist/electronic pioneer Pauline Oliveros, for their use of nontraditional notational practices and performance philosophies. In 2013–14, Sarah Belle Reid played trumpet in legendary jazz bassist Charlie Haden's band while pursuing graduate studies at Calarts. Haden asked her to improvise on one of the songs, expressing that he didn't want to hear the "right" notes or chord changes. Instead, he said, "I want to hear your voice." Although simple on the surface, this moment deeply impacted Reid, inspiring her pursue her creative interests and curiosities without concern for whether they were the "right" choices, or how they would all fit together.
In Reid's improvisations and compositions, musical notation is often experimental and graphical—an invitation to explore a new sonic universe. This spirit for exploration has led her to collaborate with musicians and artists of all genres, including experimental electronic musician David Rosenboom, thereminist Carolina Eyck, and baroque-pop artist Julia Holter. Reid recorded trumpet and electronics on Holter's 2019 record Aviary, and recently wrapped up an extensive tour throughout North America, Europe, and Australia as a member of her band. Reid's own compositions have been premiered and performed by a number of renowned musicians, most recently pianist Vicki Ray and trumpeter Nate Wooley, and have received support and recognition from the Association of Canadian Women Composers and SOCAN. In 2017 her composition “Flux” for amplified percussion quartet won the Grammy-nominated Los Angeles Percussion Quartet’s Next Wave Composer Initiative.
Reid holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from California Institute of the Arts, with a research focus on the development of new electronic instruments and musical notation systems as interfaces for exploring temporal perception and co-creation. She also has a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts, as well as a Bachelor of Music in trumpet performance from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Reid is on faculty at Chapman University (Orange, CA) teaching music technology, as well as Temple University (Philadelphia, PA), where she teaches Physical Computing and Electronic Instrument Design.
David Rosenboom
is a composer-performer, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator, known as a pioneer in American experimental music.
Since the 1960s David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has explored the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely distributed and presented around the world.
Rosenboom holds the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition in The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts. Prior to that he held the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music from 2007 through 2020 and was Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts from 1990 through 2020, a conductor with the New Century Players, Co-Director of the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, and artistic advisor for the Center for New Performance. In 2011 he also served as Acting Co-President for CalArts. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990, held the Darius Milhaud Chair, was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. In the 1970s he was founding faculty and a professor in the Music Department at York University in Toronto. His independent career outside institutions has spanned international performance and composition, consulting, recording, writing, instrument design, interdisciplinary research, and multi-media production.
He studied at the University of Illinois with Salvatore Martirano, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, Gordon Binkerd, Bernard Goodman, Paul Rolland, Jack McKenzie, Soulima Stravinsky and John Garvey among others and was later awarded the George A. Miller Professorship as a visiting artist there. He has also worked and taught in innovative institutions, such as the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, New York's Electric Circus, New York University, Banff Center for the Arts, Simon Fraser University, Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, Bard College, Center for Advanced Musical Studies at Chosen Vale, and Ionian University in Greece.
His music, performances, and productions have been recorded on various labels and commercial entities, most recently including New World Records, Tzadik, Pogus Productions, Unseen Worlds Records, Mutable Music, EM Records, Centaur Records, Lovely Music Ltd., Cold Blue, Black Saint, West Wind, Elektra Nonesuch, Frog Peak Music, Nine Winds Records, Big Pink Music, A.R.C. Records, Music Gallery Editions, and others.
Rosenboom is author of influential books such as Biofeedback and the Arts and Extended Musical Interface with the Human Nervous System and many articles and monographs, such as Propositional Music: On Emergent Properties in Morphogenesis and the Evolution of Music and Collapsing Distinctions: Interacting within Fields of Intelligence on Interstellar Scales and Parallel Musical Models. He is also coauthor with Phil Burk and Larry Polansky of the widely used software environment for experimental music, HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language). Currently, he is working on a book about compositional models and exploring the universe through experimental music, entitled Propositional Music, a variety of recordings and new musical projects.
His work is widely presented around the world. Recent highlights have included a fifty-year retrospective of his music presented in a series of performances at the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2015), a six-month exhibition of his work with brainwave music at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France (2015-2016), a four-month exhibition of his work in computer music at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2015-2016), a retrospective of his music for piano(s) at Tokyo Opera City Recital Hall (2016), the premiere of his Nothingness is Unstable, a work for electronics, acoustic sources and 3-dimentional sound diffusion at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn (2017), and numerous publications, recordings, festival performances and keynote speeches at international conferences. Following his retrospective at the Whitney Museum, he was lauded in The New York Times as an “avatar of experimental music.”
