Common Sense: BECKER

Tamper Resistant
Excerpt from The Shock of the Old

"A cover tune. Music of Telemann is treated like silly putty: twisted, stretched, and shaped into a minimalist image of itself."

Dan Becker received his DMA, MMA, and MA in Compostion from Yale University. He has worked and studied with several composers, including Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Poul Ruders, Louis Andriessen, and Terry Riley. With the help of several grants and commissions, he has written music for the concert hall as well as for experimental dance, film, and theater. He has recently completed an orchestral work for the Albany Symphony, and is currently working on pieces for the Crouse String Quartet, pianist Kathleen Supové, and the Paul Dresher Ensemble. Other recent performances include those by the Norfolk Summer Festival, Juilliard’s Focus Festival, Chicago Arts Series, OPUS415 Bay Area New Music Marathon, Bates College American Music Festival, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, University of Vermont, New Langton Arts, Sacramento State American Music Festival, and Bowdoin College. Mr Becker is the recipient of several grants and awards, most recently from the Academy of Arts and Letters and Meet the Composer. He currently serves on the board of directors of the American Music Center. In the Fall of 2001, he joined the composition faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Find out more about Dan at
http://www.danbecker.org

Gridlock
excerpt from Common Sense

"Do men and women write music differently? Are there fundamentally different ways that each gender explores the world around them? Put me with another composer and a pitcher of beer and I can bat these ideas around with the best of them. One such discussion resulted in the hypothesis that men are much more likely to understand the natural world by slapping a grid over it in order to break it up into tiny parts: approaching it from the outside in. Mapping it. Women however, it was proposed, are much more likely to get inside the natural world and pull something out from it: Excavate. Unearth. One of the implications of this - if taken to its inevitable conclusion - is that my hard-wired patriarchal male brain, along with my longtime love of maps and grids, has contributed to the destruction of the natural world. Quite a load. After realizing I was stuck with the brain I had, I decided to do what I usually do in a no-win situation: try and turn a detriment into an attribute by wearing it like a badge of honor. My piece Gridlock takes the idea of grids and runs away with it. Magnifies it. Downright celebrates it."

dan BECKER