David Morneau

David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. In his work he endeavors to explore ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity, and even the very nature of music itself. Morneau's work is characterized by his eclectic interests and collaborative spirit.

Described by Molly Sheridan as a "flashing beacon" of inspiration, Morneau's eclectic output is best exemplified by 60x365, his "ambitious yearlong musical project" for which he composed a new one-minute composition every day. These "miniature compositions include ambient tracks, found sound, instrumental performances, and plenty of loop and sample-based pieces." [The Year of Musical Thinking, A Minute At A Time, NPR's All Things Considered, 6/30/08] Selections from 60x365 have been featured on the Sonoscop festival in Barcelona, Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota, Electronic Music Midwest at Lewis University, in a collaborative dance performance with choreographer Kristin Hapke at Velocity Dance Center in Seattle, Washington, and on Jon Nelson's Some Assembly Required.

Morneau's current ambitious composition, Love Songs Project, is a collaboration with eleven poets that combines Shakespeare's sonnets with contemporary poetry in genre-crossing songs. Each song is composed in a manner that allows for easy adaptation, allowing him to create multiple arrangements for a wider range of performance options. He has been selected as this season's composer-in-residence with Alphabet Soup Productions, which will feature selections from Love Songs Project on each concert.

Morneau's first solo album, a/break machinations, fractures, re-sequences, and otherwise manipulates a single drum break, touching on several of electronic music's finest traditions, such as drum'n'bass, breakcore, trip-hop and jungle. a/break machinations grew out of a collaboration with choreographer Amiti Perry, which was presented in performance at The Ohio Sate University, and in New York City at both the Merce Cunningham Studio and Teatro La Tea. For these dance performances Morneau created video animations with the support of Harvestworks. One of these videos was also featured on SoundImageSound V at the University of the Pacific. a/break machinations was released in 2009 on Immigrant Breast Nest records, where Morneau is composer-in-residence.

Since 2006 Morneau has participated in Robert Voisey's 60x60. In 2009 he was Music Coordinator responsible for bringing 60x60 Dance, to Columbus, Ohio, for it's midwest debut. In collaboration with Dance Director Amiti Perry and Columbus Movement Movement, he produced two performances of this "sound-bite performance art" at Wallstreet Nightclub. [The Other Paper, 10/01/09] After the shows in Columbus, Morneau assisted Amiti Perry and Vox Novus with the production of additional performances at Electronic Music Midwest at Kansas City Kansas Community College, New Music Circle at MadArt, St Louis, Missouri, and at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City.

Highlights of Morneau's music with 60x60 include performances of sym5.1 at Electronic Music Midwest at Lewis University and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; performances of Here, I'll Play It Again at Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota, the Stimultania art gallery in Strasbourg, France, Elektra, a broadcast on French television, the 2008 Alternative Film & Video Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, and 60x60 Dance collaboration with Jeramy Zimmerman at Galapagos Art Space, New York City; performances of Tonight On 60x60 at EARFEST at Stony Brook University, Brookes Oxford's Sonic Art Festival in Oxford, England, Outside the Box New Music Festival at Southern Illinois University, and 60x60 Dance collaboration with Jeramy Zimmerman at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City; performances of Banal Blast on 60x60 Dance collaboration with Amiti Perry at Wallstreet Nightclub in Colubus, Ohio, Electronic Music Midwest at Kansas City Kansas Community College, New Music Circle at MadArt, St Louis, Missouri, and at World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York City, and on 60x60 Video collaboration with Patrick Liddell at University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, New Music Juke Joint, Mississippi, LOOP Videoart Festival, Barcelona, Spain, and Brookes Oxford's Sonic Art Festival in Oxford, England; and performances of What Are You Looking At? at 2010 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) Electronic Music Foundation, New York City, International Electro-Acoustic Music Festival in Chicago, Illinois, The Music Gallery in Toronto, Canada, Taipei Contemporary Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan, and Taukay Edizioni Musicali at Teatro San Giorgio da Udine, Italy.

As a composer of miniatures, Morneau's work extends beyond 60-second audio works. goodmorning, a set of mini-songs for soprano, baritone, trumpet, and trombone, based on Twitter posts, was selected for the premiere concert of the Green Bay Miniaturist Ensemble. His 100-note Chicago Miniaturist Blues was featured on the premiere concert of the Chicago Miniaturist Ensemble.

As a collaborator, Morneau creates "unusual, esoteric, and offbeat" performances. Along with choreographer Esther Palmer and artist Shana Burns, he is a founding member of Seen Performance. Together they have created a series of performances that "utilize innovative techniques to engage both their audience and their performance space." ["On the Record" Queens Ledger, 2/24/09] Their most recent pieces are the beginning of a series called The Party Project, which seeks to create performances for small groups in social settings. Box Shy is designed for performance in the midst of an audience, who assist in creating a box around Morneau and Palmer as they perform. Landings embraced the slinky toy, which Burns used to construct a set with a dozen slinks hanging from the ceiling. Morneau's music imitated the sounds of these toys while dancers moved among them to perform Palmer's choreography. These pieces have been featured at a number of venues around New York, including Triskelion Arts, Third Ward, Greenspace Studio, Queens Theater in the Park, and Vox Novus's "Composer's Voice Series." Their earlier works, On the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing, a hour long meditation on fashion and perception that asked the audience to construct the set out of over-sized TinkerToys, and Where is Tokyo?, an intimate, two audience members at a time, performance built into a studio at The Ohio State University, explore the role of an audience in a performance.

In 2009, Morneau founded another collaborative ensemble, Elevator Machine Room, with composer Robert Voisey. Their first work, Monkey Lab, is a spoken word opera that incorporates live electronics. They premiered Monkey Lab at Electronic Music Midwest in 2009. They were invited to perform it again on the International Electroacoustic Music Festival at Brooklyn College("Scream Concert") and on Alphabet Soup Productions 2010-2011 season. Currently they are developing a tribute to Robert Ashley and a full-length spoken-word opera.

Morneau was commissioned to create works for two previous International Electroacoustic Music Festivals at Brooklyn College. For the April 2010 "Tempus Fugit" concert, which collaborated with choreographers B. Artis Smith and Germaine Salsberg, he composed two short electronic works: Raven and Mockingbirds. In 2008 he composed Two Burlesques to vintage burlesque films for the Electroacoustic Speakeasy concert.

Morneau's many other collaborations include four tracks from songwriter Ed Morneau's Jacquerie, an album of protest music, I Hate John and Sunshine & Dirt, with choreographer Ashley A Friend, both of which were premiered at Joyce SoHo in New York, The Clone Zone, with Anna Sullivan, which appeared at the 2007 Fringe Festival in New York, Abandoned Revolution, for Nintendo Gameboy with choreographer Boris Willis, and Fragments of Figments, a pop-sample collage for choreographer Amiti Perry.

Since moving to New York City in 2008, Morneau's music has been presented regularly throughout the city. In addition to appearances on International Electroacoustic Music Festivals at Brooklyn College and Alphabet Soup Productions concerts, he is a regular on Vox Novus's "Composer's Voice" series. He has presented Behind Corneal Gates (soprano and electronics), Summer (soprano and piano), Flute Club (flute and electronics), Box Shy (live electronics with dance), and Boop Boop Beep (Nintendo Gameboy). He has also been invited to curate 3 concerts on this series so far, and is currently working on the October 2011 concert, which will feature W Bruce Curlette performing Morneau's Clarinet Club (clarinet and electronics). Additionally, he has been twice featured on The University of the Streets Comformer Perposer series, where he performed Boop Boop Beep, Mortal Sin(e) (live electronics), and Prelude (piano).

Morneau's music has also appeared at Electronic Music Midwest (Flurotica for flute and electronics, and Ten Minutes from 60x365), and the Spark Festival (60x365: Familiar Voices Mix, and an installation of the complete 60x365), and his graphic score Three Questions has become part of the standard repertoire for the ensemble thingNY.

Morneau is ABD in the doctoral music composition program a The Ohio State University, where he studied with Marc Ainger, Donald Harris, and Jan Radzynski. While there he was recognized as the Outstanding Graduate Student in Composition and received the Ruth Friscoe Prize in Composition for The Rhythm Variations, a set of twelve variations on the chord changes to George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." Morneau also holds a Masters in Music Composition from Western Michigan University where he studied with Richard Adams, C. Curtis-Smith, and Robert Ricci. His Bachelor of Music Composition is from Cornerstone University where he studied with Richard Stewart and was awarded the Fine Arts Division Award.

David Morneau lives in New York City with his wife. He can be found online at http://5of4.com