Collection: David Rosenboom

David Rosenboom is a composer-performer, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator, known as a pioneer in American experimental music. Since the 1960s David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has explored the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. He studied at the University of Illinois with Salvatore Martirano, Lejaren Hiller, Kenneth Gaburo, Gordon Binkerd, Bernard Goodman, Paul Rolland, Jack McKenzie, Soulima Stravinsky and John Garvey, among others.

In the 1970s he was founding faculty and a professor in the Music Department at York University in Toronto. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990, held the Darius Milhaud Chair, was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. Rosenboom holds the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition in The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts and was Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts from 1990 through 2020.

Rosenboom is author of influential books such as Biofeedback and the Arts and Extended Musical Interface with the Human Nervous System and many articles and monographs, such as Propositional Music: On Emergent Properties in Morphogenesis and the Evolution of Music and Collapsing Distinctions: Interacting within Fields of Intelligence on Interstellar Scales and Parallel Musical Models. He is also co­author with Phil Burk and Larry Polansky of the widely used software environment for experimental music, HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language). Currently, he is working on a book about compositional models and exploring the universe through experimental music, entitled Propositional Music, a variety of recordings and new musical projects.