MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program
I am a musician and artist from Ohio, and my work involves overlooked elements of sound. My training is as a composer, but in my mind I am more the generalist: an observer, a collector, a non-expert. Many of my pieces transform fragments of found source material––including field recordings, transcriptions, and samples––into a personal and often political style.
Over the past several years, I have had the opportunity to expand my focus to include sound and visual art, as well as collaborative projects with other artists working in a variety of media. As a result, sound art, installation, and multi-disciplinary, digital media collaboration has become integral to both my educational philosophy and my own work. It also has informed me of the potential inherent in creative communication—between musicians, writers, visual artists, scientists, and so on—and the value of expressing this communication through new media. My experience in these areas includes these recent projects:
My educational philosophy stems from my own experience as a practitioner in the arts, combined with pragmatic, exploratory, and scholarly approaches to the creative process. My main goal overall has been to foster an informed, knowledge- and experiential-based dialogue between students and myself, and to incorporate different philosophies, disciplines, and cultural diversity into the teaching/learning process.
Multi- and cross-disciplinary approaches are integral to my own work and my educational philosophy. Work with amateur and non-musicians is also very important to me, using the experience of composition/creation (in forms of improvisation, prose scores, field recordings, studio recording, etc.) as a tool for understanding the artistic process, as well as larger cultural connections.
Additionally, I am part of a non-profit organization and art collective, Fossil Fools, which is dedicated to disseminating information surrounding environmental and social justice issues. As part of the collective, I have worked in such areas as the coalfields of eastern Kentucky to the cornfields of northern Iowa with students, local arts organizations, and community activists. This diversity has helped me to remain open to multiple philosophies, ideas, and backgrounds.
Educational background: Master of Music in Composition, 2000, Royal Academy of Music, London, UK; Bachelor of Music in Theory and Composition, 1995, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Websites:
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Brian Harnetty, MM