60x365

Inspired by Robert Voisey’s 60x60 project, David created a new music podcast titled 60x365. Every day for a year he composed and posted a new one minute composition. The project ran from July 1, 2007 – June 30, 2008, resulting in just over six hours of new music.

David found the requirement to make a new, complete piece every day an exhilarating challenge. During the year he explored many different styles and techniques, and learned a lot about himself as a composer. He recommends that everyone try their hand at a daily art project, even if only for a month.

Selected entries:
60x365
*NC
bsym5.1
Fragments
Pepper Mash
Robot Dream
Simple Sin(e) 8
Thin Air
60x60 Composer
2011 International Mix
Crimson Mix
2009 International Mix
Order of Magnitude Mix
2008 International Mix
Evolution Mix
2007 International Mix
2007 Midwest Mix
2006 Midwest Mix
David Morneau
 

David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. In his work he endeavors to explore ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. Morneau's work is characterized by his eclectic interests and collaborative spirit.

Described by Molly Sheridan as a "flashing beacon" of inspiration, Morneau's eclectic output is best exemplified by 60x365, his "ambitious yearlong musical project" for which he composed a new one-minute composition every day. These "miniature compositions include ambient tracks, found sound, instrumental performances, and plenty of loop and sample-based pieces." [The Year of Musical Thinking, A Minute At A Time, NPR's All Things Considered, 6/30/08] Selections from 60x365 have been featured on the Sonoscop festival in Barcelona, Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota, Electronic Music Midwest at Lewis University, in a collaborative dance performance with choreographer Kristin Hapke at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, Washington, and on Jon Nelson's Some Assembly Required.

Morneau's current ambitious composition, Love Songs Project, is a collaboration with eleven poets that combines Shakespeare's sonnets with contemporary poetry in genre-crossing songs. Each song is composed in a manner that allows for easy adaptation, allowing him to create multiple arrangements for a wider range of performance options. He has been selected as this season's composer-in-residence with Alphabet Soup Productions, which will feature selections from Love Songs Project on each concert.

Morneau's first solo album, a/break machinations, fractures, re-sequences, and otherwise manipulates a single drum break, touching on several of electronic music's finest traditions, such as drum'n'bass, breakcore, trip-hop and jungle. a/break machinations grew out of a collaboration with choreographer Amiti Perry, which was presented in performance at The Ohio Sate University, and in New York City at both the Merce Cunningham Studio and Teatro La Tea. For these dance performances Morneau created video animations with the support of Harvestworks. One of these videos was also featured on SoundImageSound V at the University of the Pacific. a/break machinations was released in 2009 on Immigrant Breast Nest records, where Morneau is composer-in-residence.

Since 2006 Morneau has participated in Robert Voisey's 60x60. In 2009 he was Music Coordinator responsible for bringing 60x60 Dance, to Columbus, Ohio, for it's midwest debut. In collaboration with Dance Director Amiti Perry and Columbus Movement Movement, he produced two performances of this "sound-bite performance art" at Wallstreet Nightclub. [The Other Paper, 10/01/09] After the shows in Columbus, Morneau assisted Amiti Perry and Vox Novus with the production of additional performances at Electronic Music Midwest at Kansas City Kansas Community College, New Music Circle at MadArt, St Louis, Missouri, and at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City.

Highlights of Morneau's music with 60x60 include performances of sym5.1 at Electronic Music Midwest at Lewis University and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; performances of Here, I'll Play It Again at Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota, the Stimultania art gallery in Strasbourg, France, Elektra, a broadcast on French television, the 2008 Alternative Film & Video Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, and 60x60 Dance collaboration with Jeramy Zimmerman at Galapagos Art Space, New York City; performances of Tonight On 60x60 at EARFEST at Stony Brook University, Brookes Oxford's Sonic Art Festival in Oxford, England, Outside the Box New Music Festival at Southern Illinois University, and 60x60 Dance collaboration with Jeramy Zimmerman at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City; performances of Banal Blast on 60x60 Dance collaboration with Amiti Perry at Wallstreet Nightclub in Colubus, Ohio, Electronic Music Midwest at Kansas City Kansas Community College, New Music Circle at MadArt, St Louis, Missouri, and at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City, and on 60x60 Video collaboration with Patrick Liddell at University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, New Music Juke Joint, Mississippi, LOOP Videoart Festival, Barcelona, Spain, and Brookes Oxford's Sonic Art Festival in Oxford, England; and performances of What Are You Looking At? at 2010 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) Electronic Music Foundation, New York City, International Electro-Acoustic Music Festival in Chicago, Illinois, The Music Gallery in Toronto, Canada, Taipei Contemporary Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan, and Taukay Edizioni Musicali at Teatro San Giorgio da Udine, Italy.

As a composer of miniatures, Morneau's work extends beyond 60-second audio works. goodmorning, a set of mini-songs for soprano, baritone, trumpet, and trombone, based on Twitter posts, was selected for the premiere concert of the Green Bay Miniaturist Ensemble. His 100-note Chicago Miniaturist Blues was featured on the premiere concert of the Chicago Miniaturist Ensemble.

As a collaborator, Morneau creates "unusual, esoteric, and offbeat" performances. Along with choreographer Esther Palmer and artist Shana Burns, he is a founding member of Seen Performance. Together they have created a series of performances that "utilize innovative techniques to engage both their audience and their performance space." ["On the Record" Queens Ledger, 2/24/09] Their most recent pieces are the beginning of a series called The Party Project, which seeks to create performances for small groups in social settings. Box Shy is designed for performance in the midst of an audience, who assist in creating a box around Morneau and Palmer as they perform. Landings embraced the slinky toy, which Burns used to construct a set with a dozen slinks hanging from the ceiling. Morneau's music imitated the sounds of these toys while dancers moved among them to perform Palmer's choreography. These pieces have been featured at a number of venues around New York, including Triskelion Arts, Third Ward, Greenspace Studio, Queens Theater in the Park, and Vox Novus's "Composer's Voice Series." Their earlier works, On the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing, a hour long meditation on fashion and perception that asked the audience to construct the set out of over-sized TinkerToys, and Where is Tokyo?, an intimate, two audience members at a time, performance built into a studio at The Ohio State University, explore the role of an audience in a performance.

In 2009, Morneau founded another collaborative ensemble, Elevator Machine Room, with composer Robert Voisey. Their first work, Monkey Lab, is a spoken word opera that incorporates live electronics. They premiered Monkey Lab at Electronic Music Midwest in 2009. They were invited to perform it again on the International Electroacoustic Music Festival at Brooklyn College("Scream Concert") and on Alphabet Soup Productions 2010-2011 season. Currently they are developing a tribute to Robert Ashley and a full-length spoken-word opera.

Morneau was commissioned to create works for two previous International Electroacoustic Music Festivals at Brooklyn College. For the April 2010 "Tempus Fugit" concert, which collaborated with choreographers B. Artis Smith and Germaine Salsberg, he composed two short electronic works: Raven and Mockingbirds. In 2008 he composed Two Burlesques to vintage burlesque films for the Electroacoustic Speakeasy concert.

Morneau's many other collaborations include four tracks from songwriter Ed Morneau's Jacquerie, an album of protest music, I Hate John and Sunshine & Dirt, with choreographer Ashley A Friend, both of which were premiered at Joyce SoHo in New York, The Clone Zone, with Anna Sullivan, which appeared at the 2007 Fringe Festival in New York, Abandoned Revolution, for Nintendo Gameboy with choreographer Boris Willis, and Fragments of Figments, a pop-sample collage for choreographer Amiti Perry.

Since moving to New York City in 2008, Morneau's music has been presented regularly throughout the city. In addition to appearances on International Electroacoustic Music Festivals at Brooklyn College and Alphabet Soup Productions concerts, he is a regular on Vox Novus's "Composer's Voice" series. He has presented Behind Corneal Gates (soprano and electronics), Summer (soprano and piano), Flute Club (flute and electronics), Box Shy (live electronics with dance), and Boop Boop Beep (Nintendo Gameboy). He has also been invited to curate 3 concerts on this series so far, and is currently working on the October 2011 concert, which will feature W Bruce Curlette performing Morneau's Clarinet Club (clarinet and electronics). Additionally, he has been twice featured on The University of the Streets Comformer Perposer series, where he performed Boop Boop Beep, Mortal Sin(e) (live electronics), and Prelude (piano).

Morneau's music has also appeared at Electronic Music Midwest (Flurotica for flute and electronics, and Ten Minutes from 60x365), and the Spark Festival (60x365: Familiar Voices Mix, and an installation of the complete 60x365), and his graphic score Three Questions has become part of the standard repertoire for the ensemble thingNY.

Morneau is ABD in the doctoral music composition program a The Ohio State University, where he studied with Marc Ainger, Donald Harris, and Jan Radzynski. While there he was recognized as the Outstanding Graduate Student in Composition and received the Ruth Friscoe Prize in Composition for The Rhythm Variations, a set of twelve variations on the chord changes to George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." Morneau also holds a Masters in Music Composition from Western Michigan University where he studied with Richard Adams, C. Curtis-Smith, and Robert Ricci. His Bachelor of Music Composition is from Cornerstone University where he studied with Richard Stewart and was awarded the Fine Arts Division Award.

David Morneau lives in New York City with his wife and daughter. He can be found online at http://5of4.com

 
Catalog of Works


large ensemble

Caffeine Jitters – flute solo with jazz band (2004) commissioned by Belding High School premiered by the Belding High School Jazz Band, March 20, 2004
Collage no.1 (Hungarian) – orchestra (2006) composed for OSU Symphony Orchestra as Composer-in-Residence premiered by the OSU Symphony (Marshall Haddock, cond), June 2, 2006
Divergent Roads – wind ensemble (2003)
Hear My Cry, O God – SATB choir, organ, trumpet (2002)
House Blend – jazz band (2004) commissioned by Belding High School premiered by the Belding High School Jazz Band, March 20, 2004
Mob Mentality – wind ensemble (2005)
MOVE! – jazz band (2001) premiered by the Grand Valley State University Jazz Band, February 23, 2002
Winter at the Grand Haven Lighthouse – wind ensemble (2004)

dance

Amen – soundtrack with generated video for dance (2006)
Lifedance (Fragments of Figments)– soundtrack for dance (2006) commissioned by Amiti Perry premiered April 6-8, 2006
The Lost Revolution – soundtrack for dance (in process) commissioned by Boris Willis
Triage: Part 1 – soundtrack for dance (2005) commissioned by Ashley A. Friend premiered at The Ohio State University, April 7-9, 2005
Where is Tokyo? – soundtrack for dance (2005) commissioned by Esther Palmer premiered at The Ohio State University, November 15-19, 2005

chamber

Elegy for Sophie – piano solo (2001) premiered by Tom Moss, February 23, 2002
The Eleven-Fingered Pianist – piano solo (2000) premiered by Angie Carr, April 13, 2001
In Other Words… – clarinet and piano (2002) commissioned by W. Bruce Curlette premiered by W. Bruce Curlette and Kevin Vaughn, March 18, 2003
Joplin Fetish – marimba & piano (2005) commissioned by Brenton Dunnington
The Rhythm Variations – piano (2004) premiered by David Tolley, January, 26, 2005 also performed by Lukas Swidzinski, September 15 & 16, 2005
The Sincerest Form of Flattery – marimba (2005) commissioned by Brenton Dunnington premiered by Brenton Dunnington, May 11, 2005
Sketches of Jain – alto saxophone (2000) premiered by Erin McLennon, April 13, 2001
Watchmen – brass quintet (2003) premiered by Carly Johnson, Pierson Wetzel, Greg Edwards, Matthew Saunders, and Michael DiCiurci, February 9, 2005
Why Can’t I Have a Normal Dog Like Everyone Else? – double bass (2000) commissioned by Roger Shew premiered by Roger Shew, April 13, 2001

art song

A Gaggle of Gripes – tenor and piano (2000) text by Ogden Nash premiered by Jeremy Ribando and Heike Burghart, April 15, 2000
In Spring – mezzo-soprano and piano (2002) text by Emily Dickinson premiered by Anna Mack and Sonnet Van Patten, April 5, 2002
Stanzas – mezzo-soprano and piano (2003) text by Gertrude Stein premiered by Angela Hodgins and Brandon Straub, October 31, 2003

video / TV

Dancing DNA – soundtrack for video-dance (2004) commissioned by Rachel Boggia, Vita Berezina-Blackburn, and Susan Fisher
Nearing – soundtrack for video-dance (2006) commissioned by Norah Zuniga-Shaw & WOSU
The Rhythm of Things – soundtrack for video-dance (2005) commissioned by Norah Zuniga-Shaw & WOSU

electroacoustic

in8 – Game Boy with Nanoloop 1.3
Survival Machine – flute and computer (2005) commissioned by Susan Fisher premiered by Nicole Charles, September 15 & 16, 2005
Voices From Salem, MA, 1692 – (1999) premiered at Western Michigan University, April 15, 2000

 
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