Description
A circular trajectory: I was born and raised in and near Philadelphia. I journeyed to New York to attend the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where I studied film production. I then traveled to Boston to attend The New England Conservatory for graduate school, where I studied composition and jazz piano performance. I then made a full-circle return to Philadelphia to begin teaching and composing/recording. I've been working and creating music unrelentingly since the highly productive time I spent in Boston. I now have more than 60 albums (of often "genre-less" music) and dozens of "concert music" compositions. Many of my recordings are comprised of my improvised music (solo and with ensembles); and this improvised music reveals and reflects all of the musical genres (as well as a plethora of other art forms) that have informed my life. These influences include classical music, contemporary concert music, avant-garde jazz, rock and popular music, film, photography, drawing, and painting.
The string quartets and the piano concerto on this album are the results of my instincts, interests, and education i.e., the way I perceive and feel the world. I had to write the musical information on paper--for the string quartets--in order to it give it to the players/interpreters, but I believe that the content employed, and the resultant form, developed in the same way they would have had I somehow been able to improvise upon all of the instruments--or draw the music onto paper in real time, with four hands writing out the music for the individual instruments simultaneously.
On the other hand, my concerto for piano and electronics Everything that no one ever saw is entirely improvised. The foundation of synthesized sounds--which function here as the "orchestra"--were chosen beforehand; and I then spontaneously overdubbed these chosen sounds in an arbitrary sequence, and in multiple passes, to make up the "orchestra" part. I then had the resultant backing-track play in headphones, whilst I improvised on the acoustic piano (in one take) to try and thread the wildly various--and electronic--sonic events together with a lyrical line.
The cumulative energy of all the music on this album strikes me as my own liberated essence sans a material container.
Adam Berenson
