Alex Christie is a San Francisco Bay Area composer, performer, improviser, and educator working in the worlds of both acoustic and electronic music. His work is the hybridization of hyper-intellectualized contemporary music theory and a childish obsession with explosive sound and bright, flashing lights. Alex holds a BM from the Oberlin Conservatory in Composition and TIMARA (Technology In Music And Related Arts) and an MFA from Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media. Alex performs as a laptopist in several veins of music, ranging from experimental improvisatory noise to electronic dance. He performs free jazz and freely improvised music as a saxophonist and is always striving to find new ways in which the world of electronic music and free improvisation intersect. As an educator, Alex currently teaches composition, electronic music, and music theory at Santa Clara University and spends his summers teaching similar material to a group of talented 10-18 year-olds at the Walden School’s Young Musicians Program.
Alex will present a talk and performance demo (with Dana Jessen) on electroacoustic improvisation. The lecture is free and open to the public: 3:00pm on Wednesday, September 11 in TIMARA Studio 2. In addition to his lecture, Alex will be on campus to oversee the recording of a new piece for an album of works for piano and electronics, featuring Tom Rosenkranz ’99 on piano. Special thanks to the Alumni Association for their support of this lecture.
