Dan Schmidt

I hold an S.B. from MIT in musical composition (yes, really), studying there with Martin Brody, Peter Child, and John Harbison, and receiving the school's William Eugene Edgerton Award for musical achievement. I lead the rock group Honest Bob & the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives; and am co-Music Director of, and composer for, Gamelan Galak Tika, the Boston area's first Balinese gamelan.

I generally write music with a strong sense of rhythmic motion, often skewed by the use of mixed meters. While I've explored all of the tonal-atonal spectrum, I do attempt to write music that will be striking and memorable on first listen. I will attempt to put up scores and MP3s to some of these pieces in the near future.

Interested in having me write something for you? Let me know.

Compositions I haven't yet disowned:

Five very early songs (1990) for soprano and piano (7 minutes): based on poems and stories by elementary school students.

I. A famous artist's work
II. The thousand dollars
III. Homework
IV. Unicorn and Dum the dragon
V. The leaf that told me a story

As a wife has a cow, a love story (1992) for soprano and piano (7 minutes): based on the poem by Gertrude Stein, and appropriating her stuttering syntax.

Bloom (1993) for piano (8 minutes): an exploration of latent possibilities.

Rag of the Nibelung (1993) for piano (3 minutes): a ragtime adaptation of your favorite Wagner tunes, as was popular in the day.

Rapid Eye Movement (1993) for piano (6 minutes): in which the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Prelude in C major (1994) for piano (3 minutes): an experiment in which Bach is put in a pitch-class blender and emerges somewhat the worse for wear.

Twelve tonal pieces (1994) for piano (10 minutes): as the title indicates.

Here follows a long period of writing nothing but pop songs. The shame.

A Dangerous Thing (2000) for gamelan gong kebyar (6 minutes): in which an American composer contemplates Bali and Bulgaria and splits the difference.

Performed by Gamelan Galak Tika at the Bang On A Can Millennium Marathon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; a RealAudio broadcast from WNYC can be found here. Choose program #1864 (from 14 Dec 2000); the piece is presented about fourteen minutes into the program.


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Last updated 15 December 2000