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Christopher Adler is a composer, performer and improviser living in San Diego, California. His music draws upon fifteen years of research into the traditional musics of Thailand and Laos and a background in mathematics. He is internationally recognized as a foremost performer of new and traditional music for the khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and Northeast Thailand. As pianist and composer-in-residence with NOISE and co-founder of the soundON Festival of Modern Music he has promoted the works of emerging composers, and as an improviser on piano and as a conductor he has performed with many of the West coast’s finest improvisers. Christopher Adler's compositions encompass cross-culturally hybrid forms drawn from contemporary concert music and traditional musics of Thailand and Laos, the application of mathematics to composition, and the integration of improvisation into structured composition. His works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Center, Tanglewood, Merkin Hall, Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo and at new music festivals and universities across the U.S. and Canada by ensembles including the Silk Road Ensemble, red fish blue fish, Ensemble ACJW, Ensemble 64.8, the Van Buren String Quartet, the Pangaea Quartet, pulsoptional, NOISE and the Seattle Creative Orchestra. His 2009 composition Pines Long Slept in Sunshine was commissioned by an international consortium of ten percussion ensembles led by the University of Kentucky. His compositions have been released on the 2008 CD Ecstatic Volutions in a Neon Haze (Innova) and the 2004 CD Epilogue for a Dark Day (Tzadik), and have been broadcast and webcast internationally on WGBH’s Art of the States, WNYC and BBC-3. His retrospective analysis of his first ten years of cross-cultural composition has been published in John Zorn’s Arcana II: Musicians on Music (Hips Road, 2007). Christopher Adler is the world's leading innovator in contemporary concert music for the khaen. He has performed his own compositions and traditional repertoire at Carnegie Hall, the Bang on a Can Marathon, Music at the Anthology, the Cultural Center of Chicago, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and at many other universities in the U.S., Thailand and Singapore. He has further promoted the instrument by commissioning new solo works from composers such as Sidney Marquez Boquiren and Christopher Burns, and by recording multiple works by David Loeb for the Vienna Modern Masters label. As a soloist and as pianist with the San Diego New Music resident ensemble, NOISE, he has appeared at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of California at San Diego, and the California Institute of the Arts. He has recorded compositions by Derek Keller (Tzadik) and Nathan Hubbard (Circumvention/Accretions), and by Stuart Saunders Smith and Christopher Burns for forthcoming releases. In 2007, he co-founded the soundON Festival of Modern Music, presented annually in La Jolla, California, and he is one of the only pianists in the world performing Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue. He performs improvised music on piano and khaen and is a frequent collaborator with woodwind player Alan Lechusza and with drummer Vikas Srivastava as the Christopher Adler Trio. He has conducted large improvising ensemble projects by Alan Lechusza and Nathan Hubbard, and has performed with such prominent improvisers as Mark Dresser, George Lewis, Anthony Davis, Vinny Golia, Michael Vlatkovich, Christopher Garcia, and Gustavo Aguilar. His piano improvisations may be heard on Mineralia (pfMENTUM) and Pleistocene, by the Alan Lechusza/ Christopher Adler Duo, and on Transcontinental, by the Christopher Adler Trio (Nine Winds), and his improvisations on khaen have been released by Artship Recordings and Accretions. Christopher Adler is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego where he teaches composition, sound art, theory, twentieth-century music, and world music. He received Ph.D. and Master’s degrees in composition from Duke University and Bachelor’s degrees in music composition and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied composition with Scott Lindroth, Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett, Evan Ziporyn, Thai music with Panya Roongruang, and pipe organ with James David Christie and Haig Mardirosian. 167 words Christopher Adler is a composer, performer and improviser living in San Diego, California. His music draws upon over a decade of research into the traditional musics of Thailand and Laos and a background in mathematics. He is a foremost performer of traditional and new music for the khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and Northeast Thailand. As pianist and composer-in-residence with NOISE and co-founder of the soundON Festival of Modern Music he has promoted the works of emerging composers, and as an improviser on piano and as a conductor he has performed with many of the West coast's finest improvisers. He received Ph.D. and Master's degrees in composition from Duke University and Bachelor's degrees in music composition and in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego. His work may be heard on Tzadik, Innova, pfMENTUM, Nine Winds Records, Artship Recordings, Vienna Modern Masters, Circumvention, Accretions, and WGBH's Art of the States. www.christopheradler.com
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| Portrait photo by Vika Golovanova |  |
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Portrait in a traditional Thai house by Supeena Insee Adler small - 72-dpi (shown at left) |
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