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about the music

Christopher Adler:

"The khaen, a fifteen-note bamboo free-reed mouth organ, is the primary instrument of the Lao people who live in lowland Laos and northeast Thailand. My experience with the khaen began eight years ago after encountering the instrument at a Thai festival in the United States. Since then, I have become fluent in traditional khaen performance and travel frequently to northeast Thailand for research and teaching, and I am called upon to perform at Thai community events in the United States. My solo repertoire for this instrument incorporates traditional techniques and contemporary musical concepts. In Telemetry Lock, the typical two-layered texture of traditional khaen music, consisting of a drone and a rapid rhythmic melody, is accelerated into an improvised quasi-electronic stream onto which melodic and rhythmic fragments are superimposed. There are up to four layers [occurring] simultaneously, reaching the limit of the polyphonic capability of the instrument."

about the composer		back to top

Christopher Adler's (b. 1972) work emerges from an exchange between composition, improvisation, mathematics, and the traditional music of Thailand and Laos. He is internationally recognized as a composer and performer of new and traditional music for khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and northeast Thailand. Adler's music is influenced by experimental and minimalist music of the United States, including the early works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, later works of Morton Feldman and John Cage, and the ambient works of Alvin Lucier. He has also been influenced by the recent interactions of popular and classical genres by such composers as Louis Andriessen, Michael Gordon, and Evan Ziporyn.

Adler was born in Mountain View, California, and grew up in California and Washington, DC. He studied composition and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and composition at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His teachers included Scott Lindroth, Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett, Evan Ziporyn, and for studies of Thai music, Panya Roongruang. Adler currently teaches composition, sound art, theory, computer music, and world music at the University of San Diego; he has also taught at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, and was a visiting professor at Mahasarakham University in Thailand.

Adler's music has been performed across the US by ensembles including NOISE, pulsoptional, red fish blue fish, Seattle Creative Orchestra, Silk Road Ensemble, and many solo artists. A CD of Adler's music, Epilogue for a Dark Day, is available on the Tzadik label, and his retrospective analysis of ten years of cross-cultural composition was recently published in Arcana II: Musicians on Music (Hips Road). Adler has performed his own khaen compositions and traditional repertoire at the Bang on a Can Marathon, Carnegie Hall, Cultural Center of Chicago, Music at the Anthology, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and many universities across the US and Thailand. He promotes the instrument through the commissioning of new works, recently premiering a work by Sidney Marquez Boquiren and recording a work by David Loeb for the Vienna Modern Masters label.

Adler is pianist and composer-in-residence with the San Diego New Music resident ensemble NOISE, and recently co-founded the soundON Festival of Modern Music, four days of performances and workshops in June 2007 centered around the work of emerging composers. He performs improvised music on piano in a duo with woodwind player Alan Lechusza and trio with drummer Vikas Srivastava. In addition, he collaborates on khaen with Marcelo Radulovich, Charles Curtis, and Scott Walton as the improvising acoustic ensemble Gunther's Grass. Adler has conducted large improvising ensemble projects by Alan Lechusza and Nathan Hubbard, and performed with a wide range of improvising musicians. Recordings of these projects are available on the Accretions, Artship, Nine Winds, and pfMENTUM labels.

related websites
http://www.christopheradler.com