Title: Dynamic RAM and Concert Grand
Commission: 2011
Completed: 2014
Instrumentation: piano and laptop
Premiere Location: New York, NY
Premiere Ensemble: Vicky Chow and Neil Rolnick
Notes:

Composer Neil Rolnick pioneered the use of computers in musical performance, beginning in the late 1970s. Based in New York City since 2002, his music has been performed world wide, including recent performances in Cuba, China, Korea, Mexico and across the US and Europe. His string quartet Oceans Eat Cities was performed at the UN Global Climate Summit in Paris in Dec. 2015. In 2016 and 2017 he was awarded an ArtsLink residency in Belgrade, Serbia, a New Music USA Project Grant and an artist residency at the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa, Italy. In 2019 he received an Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, for a new work for pianist Geoff Burleson. In early 2020 he was featured at the Primavera en la Habana festival in Cuba.

Rolnick’s music has often included unexpected and unusual combinations of materials and media. His work ranges from digital sampling and interactive multimedia to acoustic vocal, chamber and orchestral works. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s he was responsible for the development of the first integrated electronic arts graduate and undergraduate programs in the US, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s iEAR Studios, in Troy, NY.

Though much of his work connects music and technology, and is therefore considered in the realm of “experimental” music, it has always been highly melodic and accessible. Whether working with electronic sounds, acoustic ensembles, or combinations of the two, his music has been characterized by critics as “sophisticated,” “hummable and engaging,” and as having “good senses of showmanship and humor.”

Neil Rolnick was born in 1947, in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BA in English from Harvard in 1969. He studied composition with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music School, and with John Adams at the San Francisco Conservatory. He earned a PhD in musical composition in 1980 from UC Berkeley. He studied computer music at Stanford with John Chowning, and was a researcher at IRCAM in Paris, France, from 1977–79.