Carl Stone is an American composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

, primarily working in the field of live electronic music

Electronic music

Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...

. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East.

Stone studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts

California Institute of the Arts

The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...

 with Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick

Morton Subotnick is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch...

 and James Tenney

James Tenney

James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...

 and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. As an undergrad at CalArts, he had a work-study job in the Music Library, which had many thousands of LP records in the circulating collection (this was 1973). The collection included a lot of western classical music of course but also a really comprehensive world music collection, avant-garde, electronic music, jazz and more. Because the librarians were concerned that the LPs, many of which were rare, would soon become unlistenable at the hands of the students and faculty, his job was to take every disc and record it onto cassette, a kind of back-up operation.He soon discovered that he could monitor the output of any of the recordings he was making and even mix them together without disturbing the recordings. So, he began to experiment, making musical collages , and
started to develop habits of combining disparate musical materials. In addition to his composition and performance schedule, he is a faculty member in the Department of Information Media, School of Information Science and Technology at Chukyo University

Chukyo University

is a private university in Aichi, Japan, with campuses in Nagoya and Toyota.-External links:*...

 in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

.

Stone utilizes a laptop computer as his primary instrument and his works often feature very slowly developing manipulations of samples of acoustic music, speech, or other sounds. Because of this, as well as his preference for tonal melodic and harmonic materials similar to those used in popular musics, Stone's work has been associated with the movement known as minimalism

Minimalist music

Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School....

.

Prior to his settling on the laptop, in the 1980s, he created a number of electronic and collage works utilizing various electronic equipment as well as turntables

Turntablism

Turntablism is the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph turntables and a DJ mixer.The word 'turntablist' was coined in 1995 by DJ Babu to describe the difference between a DJ who just plays records, and one who performs by touching and moving the records, stylus and mixer...

. Prominent works from this period include Dong Il Jang (1982) and Shibucho (1984), both of which subjected a wide variety of appropriated musical materials (e.g. Okinawan folk song, European Renaissance music

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

, 1960s Motown, etc.) to fragmentation and looping

Music loop

In electroacoustic music, a loop is a repeating section of sound material. Short sections of material can be repeated to create ostinato patterns...

. In this way his work paralleled innovations being made in the early days of rap

Rapping

Rapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The art form can be broken down into different components, as in the book How to Rap where it is separated into “content”, “flow” , and “delivery”...

 and hip hop

Hip hop music

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...

 (e.g. Grandmaster Flash

Grandmaster Flash

Joseph Saddler better known as King Grandmaster Flash, is an American hip hop musician and DJ; one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing, cutting, and mixing....

, of whose work he was unaware at the time). It was during this period that he began naming many of his works after his favorite restaurants (often Asian ones).

His first residency in Japan, sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council

Asian Cultural Council

The Asian Cultural Council is an American non-profit organization dedicated to providing support to Asian-American cultural exchange in the areas of visual and performing arts.- History :...

, was from November 1988 to April 1989. While living in Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

 he collected more than 50 hours of recordings of the city's urban soundscape, which he later used as the basis for his radio composition Kamiya Bar, sponsored by Tokyo FM

Tokyo FM

Tokyo FM Broadcasting Co., Ltd. is a radio station in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the flagship station of the Japan FM Network .-Program:*Countdown Station** DHC Countdown jp** cosmo Pops Best 10...

 radio, and released on a CD of the same name by the Italian label NewTone / Robi Droli.

Stone has collaborated frequently with Asian performers, including traditional instrumentalists such as Min Xiao-Fen

Min Xiao-Fen

Min Xiaofen is a Chinese pipa player and vocalist, known for her work in traditional Chinese music, contemporary classical music, and jazz.She studied with her father, Min Ji-Qian, a professor and pipa instructor at Nanjing University, and performed as pipa soloist for the Nanjing National Music...

 (pipa

Pipa

The pipa is a four-stringed Chinese musical instrument, belonging to the plucked category of instruments . Sometimes called the Chinese lute, the instrument has a pear-shaped wooden body with a varying number of frets ranging from 12–26...

), Yumiko Tanaka (shamisen

Shamisen

The , also called is a three-stringed, Japanese musical instrument played with a plectrum called a bachi. The Japanese pronunciation is usually "shamisen" but sometimes "jamisen" when used as a suffix . -Construction:The shamisen is a plucked stringed instrument...

), Kazue Sawai

Kazue Sawai

is a Japanese koto player noted for her performance of contemporary classical music and free improvisation.She began studying, at the age of eight, with Michio Miyagi. She later graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music....

 (koto

Koto (musical instrument)

The koto is a traditional Japanese stringed musical instrument, similar to the Chinese guzheng, the Mongolian yatga, the Korean gayageum and the Vietnamese đàn tranh. The koto is the national instrument of Japan. Koto are about length, and made from kiri wood...

), Michiko Akao (ryuteki

Ryuteki

The is a Japanese transverse fue made of bamboo. It is used in gagaku, the Shinto classical music associated with Japan's imperial court. The sound of the ryūteki is said to represent the dragons which ascend the skies between the heavenly lights and the people of the earth...

), and those working with modern instruments, such as Otomo Yoshihide

Yoshihide Otomo

is a Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist.He first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the noise rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz, avant-garde and contemporary classical...

 (turntables, guitar), Kazuhisa Uchihashi

Kazuhisa Uchihashi

Kazuhisa Uchihashi is a Japanese guitarist involved in free improvisation music. Born in 1959 in Osaka, Uchihashi began to play the guitar at age 12, playing in various rock bands, though he later studied jazz music. In 1988 he joined the band the First Edition, and in 1990 formed the band...

 (guitar, daxophone

Daxophone

The daxophone, invented by Hans Reichel, is an experimental musical instrument of the friction idiophones category. It consists of a thin wooden blade fixed in a wooden block , which holds one or more contact microphones...

), Yuji Takahashi

Yuji Takahashi

is a Japanese composer, performer, pianist and author.Studied under Roh Ogura and Minao Shibata at the Toho Gakuen School of Music. In 1960, he made his debut as a pianist by performing Bo Nilsson's Quantitaten. He lived in Europe from 1963 to 1966 where he worked with Iannis Xenakis. He gave the...

 (computer, piano), and vocalists such as Reisu Saki and Haco. He has also collaborated on an album with Hirohito Ihara's Radicalfashion and recently with Alfred Harth

Alfred Harth

Alfred 23 Harth is a German multimedia artist, band leader, multi-instrumentalist musician, and composer who mixes genres in a polystylistic manner...

 who partly lives in Korea

Korea

Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...

.

Beginning in the early years of the 21st century, Stone began to compose more frequently for acoustic instruments and ensembles, completing a new work for the San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

-based American Baroque.

Stone served as president of the American Music Center

American Music Center

The American Music Center is a non-profit organization which aims to promote the creating, performing, and enjoying new American music. The organization was founded in 1939 by composers Marion Bauer, Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, Harrison Kerr, Otto Luening, and Quincy Porter.The organization has a...

 from 1992 to 1995, and was director of Meet the Composer

Meet the Composer

Meet the Composer is an American organization founded in 1974 by the composer John Duffy as a project of the New York State Council on the Arts. It seeks to assist composers in making a living through writing music by sponsoring commissioning, residency, education, and audience interaction...

/California from 1981 to 1997. He also served as music director of KPFK

KPFK

KPFK is a listener-sponsored radio station based in North Hollywood, California, United States, which serves the Greater Los Angeles Area, and also streams 24 hours a day via the Internet...

-FM in Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

 from 1978 to 1981.

For many years, Stone has divided his time between San Francisco and Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

.

In 1999 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Solo recordings

Al Noor (2007) – Explorations into the dismantling and re-composition of global song and melody

• Al Noor
• Flint’s
• Jitlada
• L’Os à Moelle
• Dino’s (Bonus track, available through iTunes only http://www.intonemusic.com/CARLSTONE%20Al-Noor.html)

Nak Won (2002) – Real-time music for lap-top computer

• Nak Won
• Kreuz
• Darul Kabap

Resonator (2002) – Soundtrack for the works of sculptor Seiji Kunishima

• Sapp

Exusiai (1998, released 1999) – Music for contemporary dancer Akira Kasai

• Solo 1
• Unconsciousness
• Violence
• Meteors
• Moon Dance
• Violence
• Solo
• Liquid Body
• Echoing
• Bomb

em:t 1196 (1996) – The musical part of a three-way collaboration between the composer, dancer Kuniko Kisanuki and sculptor Satoru Shoji

• Nyala, Sections I–IV (1995)

Kamiya Bar (1995) – Excerpts from a sound collage assembled in 1992 from TV commercials and field recordings made in Tokyo in the late 1980s

• Gild
• Axis
• Young Jump
• Big Gold
• Cue
• Cooking Papa
• Val

Mom’s (1992)

• Banteay Srey (1991)
• Mom’s (1990)
• Gadberry’s (1989, recorded in performance 1990)
• Shing Kee (1986) A re-issue of the track on "Four pieces"
• Chao Nue (1990)

Four Pieces (1989) – Playful explorations and transformations for Macintosh computer

• Wall Me Do (1987)
• Hop Ken (1989)
• Shing Kee (1986)
• Sonali (1988)

Wave-Heat (1983) – Piece for digital delay/harmonizer and an LP record; released on audio cassette




Woo Lae Oak (1981, released 1983; re-issued 2008 as a single continuous track) – A concrete symphony for the tremolo of a rubbed string and the tone of a blown bottle

• Woo Lae Oak, Part I
• Woo Lae Oak, Part II

Some unreleased recordings

• Shibucho (1984) – Piece utilizing samples from Motown recordings
• Torung (1983) – Piece for Synclavier
• Dong Il Jang (1982) – Piece for digital delay/harmonizer and vinyl records
• Sukothai (1979) – A sample from Henry Purcell's Rondo from Adbelazar, building in multiples to 1024 layers
• Maneeya (1973) – Piece for tape
• Plastics (1972) – Film soundtrack
• LIM (1972) – Piece for tape

Other released collaborations

Pict.soul (2000–2001) – Long-distance collaboration with Tetsu Inoue


Monogatari: Amino Argot (1994) – Long-distance collaboration with Otomo Yoshihide


Over-Ring-Under (1992) – Soundtrack to a videogame CD-ROM, with visual artist Teckon

Other commissioned works

• Luong Hai Ky Mi Gia (2001) – DVD-Audio/Video piece for 5.1 surround sound system; commissioned by Starkland
• Sa Rit Gol (1997) – Piece for disklavier and pianist; commissioned by Bay Area Pianists and Cal Performances, as part of the Henry Cowell Centennial Celebration at UC Berkeley
• The Noh Project (1996) – A collaboration with choreographer June Watanabe and Noh master Anshin Uchida
• Yam Vun Sen (1995) – Network duel piece for the internet; commissioned by NTT as part of IC95 Festival, Tokyo
• Sudi Mampir (1995) – Contribution to compilation album "em:t 5595"
• Banh Mi So (1994) – Piece for ondes martenot and piano; commissioned by Takashi Harada and Aki Takahashi
• Mae Ploy (1994) – Piece for String Quartet and computer accompanist; commissioned by the Strings Plus Festival, Kobe, for the Smith Quartet
• Lumpinee (1993) – Installation for computer-operated MIDI system; commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles for the exhibition "John Cage: Rolywholyover: A Circus"
• Du Pars (1993) – Soundtrack for interactive laserdisk "L.A. Journal", produced by Voyager
• Ruen Pair (1993) – Piece for electronic chamber ensemble; commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble
• Rezukuja (1991) – Piece for bass marimba and electronics; commissioned by Sumire Yoshihara
• She Gol Jib (1991) – Piece for ryuteki (flute) and electronics; commissioned by Michiko Akao
• Recurring Cosmos (1991) – Piece for High Definition video and electronics, including Banteay Srey; commissioned by Sony PCL
• Made in Hollywood (1990) – Soundtrack music; commissioned by ZDF Television, Germany
• Thonburi (1989) – Part of the radio series "Territory of Art"
• Spalding Gray's Map of L.A. (1987) – Soundtrack for videotape produced and directed by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
• Vault (1984) – Soundtrack for videotape produced and directed by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
• Mae Yao (1984) – Piece for live electronics, multiple bagpipes and pipe organ; commissioned by The Art of Spectacle Festival
• Se Jong (1983) – Piece for tape; commissioned by the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival as part of the radio series "Sounds In Motion"

External links

• Official website
• Golden, Barbara. “Conversation with Carl Stone.” eContact! 12.2 — Interviews (2) (April 2010). Montréal: CEC
  Canadian Electroacoustic Community
  Founded in 1986, La Communauté électroacoustique canadienne / The Canadian Electroacoustic Community is Canada’s national electroacoustic / computer music / sonic arts organization and as such is dedicated to promoting this progressive art form in its broadest definition: from “pure” acousmatic...
  
  .
• O’Toole, Owen. “Carl Stone Interview.” Interview from 27 August 2009, La Brea Farmers Market. Underminds, 17 December 2009.
• Taylor, Gregory. “An Interview With Carl Stone.” Cycling 74, 13 September 2005.
• webSYNradio. “websynradio – programmed by Carl Stone.” podcast available, 18-25 march 2010.

Listening

• http://www.starkland.com/st2010/index.htmsurround sound recording of Luong Hai Ky Mi Gia, commissioned by Starkland
  Starkland
  Starkland is an independent record label based in Boulder, Colorado that specializes in alternative classical music. It was founded in 1991 by Thomas Steenland....
  
  ]
• Excerpt from 2002 sound. at the Schindler House performance at SASSAS @ YouTube