Saturday, March 8, 2014

David Dunn



David Dunn began composing music at the age of fourteen.  At seventeen he began working as an assistant to composer Harry Partch, maintaining the composer's instruments and performing in his ensemble in concerts and recordings.  Later he worked with composer Kenneth Gaburo, to whom the first piece on his Four Electroacoustic Compositions (Pogus Productions, 2002) is dedicated.  Inspired by Gaburo's ideas concerning the relationships between linguistics and music, Dunn wrote the piece Tabula Angelorum Bonorum 49 (Angels and Insects, WN0009 1992) using an angelic language channeled by John Dee and Edward Kelley in 16th century England as source material.  His piece Mimus Polyglottos (1976) engages the mockingbird's mimetic abilities with electronically created sounds.  Dunn utilizes a myriad of devices and systems of varying complexity to create his pieces, from a microphone constructed from a plastic pen and hearing aid to the Vidium MK II, a "hybrid analog synthesizer which acts as a "hyper Lissajous pattern generator.""

Mimus Polyglottos

Autonomous Systems: Red Rocks

Environment, Consciousness, and Magic: an interview with David Dunn by Michael R. Lampert (1988)

David Dunn's Homepage with scores, writing, recordings, and pictures



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