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Chris BrownLink to home page : Chris Brown  Biography: Chris Brown's music has explored the intersection between many traditions and styles. Beginning as a classical pianist, he was influenced by American experimental and improvisational musics as well as by studies of Indonesian, Indian, and Cuban musics. Since the late 1970's he has been building a personal electronic instrumentation. At first these were amplified acoustic devices; then he went on to build analog circuits that modified their sounds, and custom-made computer systems that interactively transformed them. More recently, the sounds of these instruments have been sampled and mixed freely with an expandingcollection of concrete and synthetic sounds. Collaboration and improvisation have been primary in the development of his music for various traditional instruments and interactive electronics. He has had commissions for such pieces from the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, among others. As pianist with the Glenn Spearman Double Trio he performed and recorded music in the free-jazz tradition at venues including the San Francisco and Monterey Jazz Festivals, the DuMaurier and Victoriaville Festivals in Canada, and extensively in Europe. He has performed and recorded with such prominent and varied improvisors as Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, Barry Guy, Ikue Mori, Dave Douglas, and John Zorn. He has also been active as a pianist in performing the music of composers such as James Tenney, Henry Cowell, Christian Wolff, William Brooks, David Rosenboom, Luc Ferrari, and Terry Riley. Chris Brown's most recent works involve extending the experiences of Network Music into new performance venues. An installation involving networked rhythm-machines in large or outdoor sites, "Talking Drum" has been produced in Montreal, San Francisco, and Holland. A new series of concert pieces called "Inventions" have sprouted from the polyrhythm generating software for that piece. He is associate professor of music at Mills College where he teaches theory, computer music and Ethnomusicology. CDs on which Chris Brown appears:
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