Michael Edward Edgerton (born October 31, 1961, in Racine, Wisconsin) is an American composer and associate professor of music composition and theory at the Guangxi Arts University. He received his D.M.A. in music composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana (1994); the M.M. from Michigan State University (1987) and the B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Parkside (1984). From 1996 to 1999, Edgerton was a postdoctoral fellow with the National Center for Voice and Speech, based at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has studied composition with William Brooks, Morgan Powell, Jere Hutcheson and August Wegner.
Awards/recognition
2007 Kompositionspreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart
2007 Composition Contest of the Netherlands Radio Choir – Semifinalist (Kalevi Matus, #58) 2003 5th Dutilleaux International Composition Compétition – Selection (1 sonata, #70) 2001 31 Festival Synthese Bourges – Sélection (The Elements of Risk in Creation, #59) 1999 Sal Martirano composition competition – Finalist (Regret of a Noiseless Sundering, #22) 1995 MacDowell Club Award for composition – First Prize (Unspoken Crime, #9) 1993 Friends and Enemies of New Music – reading (Net/Byrinth, #15) 1988 Midwest Composers Symposium – selection (A Penny for the Young Guy, #3 ) 1987 National Federation of Music Clubs Composition Competition – Third Prize (Ai, #5) 1987 National Federation of Music Clubs Composition Competition – Honorable Mention (Dwellers of the Southwest, #2) 1986 Michigan State University Orchestral Composition Competition – First Prize (The Final Diary of a Branch, #1)
Style
Since mid-1990 Edgerton has been pioneering the compositional use of scaled & desynchronized multidimensional networks in order to unlock nonlinear phenomenon inherent in mechanical sound production systems (voice and musical instruments). These procedures utilize topological inquiry focused on little traveled regions of the total sonic map. For Edgerton, these multidimensional networks do not just focus on articulation, which is dominant with many who utilize multi-parametric organization. Rather, with Edgerton, these networks utilize all structural components of the mechanical system: power, source, resonance and articulation in order to affect a meaningful (perceptible) sound difference from ordinario. Additionally, more than a focus on unusual sounds or performance practice, the systematic use of desynchronized procedures coupled tightly to expected bifurcations amongst attractor states are utilized as intelligent generative procedures encompassing the consonance/dissonance and musical tension of these extra-complex sonorities (tones that exceed a single fundamental frequency with gradually sloping spectra).
In works such as adjusting to beams falling and his String Quartet #1, he attempts to convey an expression similar to Edward Said's notion of an artwork exhibiting "intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction" in order to provide an "occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure and leave the audience more perplexed than before... to explore...a nonharmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, going 'against'..."
Linkage. Other composers who have worked with desynchronized and/or multidimensional methods include Richard Barrett, Aaron Cassidy, Frank Cox, Julio Estrada, Brian Ferneyhough, Klaus K. Hübler, among others. Edgerton's work is sometimes associated with New Complexity in music.
Voice
Edgerton is a specialist of the extra-normal voice as composer, pedagogue, researcher and performer.
Voice composition: Edgerton has written numerous compositions involving normal and extra-normal voice. Since the mid-90s his voice compositions have focused on searching for the bio-acoustic limits of vocal sound production that involve: 1) nonlinear phenomena; 2) simultaneous sound sources in the vocal tract; 3) multidimensionalty of vocal sound production. Additionally, Edgerton has incorporated sound production procedures seen in ethnic musical traditions from Tuva, Tibet, South Africa, Korea and India, to name a few. Representative compositions featuring the extra-normal voice include: #82 Cataphora, #77 A Marriage of Shadows, #68 prana, #62 Anaphora, #54 Friedrich’s Comma, #45 Taffy Twisters, among others.