Culver, (David) Andrew

Culver, (David) Andrew , inventive American-Canadian composer, instrument maker, and performer;b. Morristown, N.J., Aug. 30, 1953. He studied composition with John Rea and Bengt Hambraeus, electronic music with Alcides Lanza, and sound recording with Wieslaw Woczcyk at McGill Univ. in Montreal (B.M., 1977; M.M., 1980). He subsequently was a founding member of SONDE, a Canadian music design and performance ensemble. He pioneered the musical application of R. Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity structural principle, devising richly resonant music sculptures that vibrate synergistically. His output of more than 60 works takes four forms: stage performances by music sculpture ensemble, interactive music sculpture installations, computer- displayed text and electroacoustic music projections, and scores for traditional instruments. His solo stage works include Viti (1981) and Music with Tensegrity Sound Source #5 (1983), which he has performed in Europe, Canada, and the U.S.; his Hard Lake Frozen Moon (1989), for two performers active in an elaborate stage environment built up of 19 sound sources, was commissioned by Toronto’s New Music Concerts and the Laidlaw Foundation. His Quasicrystals… (1989), developed with pianist Thomas Moore at the Yellow Springs Inst. for Contemporary Studies and the Arts, is a work for two performers on separate and complex itineraries within a field of 21 amplified, hanging music sculptures. Chance-composed lighting is an essential, determining element of these and other works. Culver has also created public installations of interactive music sculptures, including those at the Staten Island Children’s Museum (1983) and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (1989–91). From 1984 to 1992, Culver worked with John Cage, developing computer programs toward the realization of Cage’s musical and poetic processes. His programs ic and tic, computer simulations of the coin oracle of the I Ching, were used in all aspects of the composition and direction of Cage’s Europems 1 & 2 (1987). He composed Ocean 1–95 for 112 Instrumental Soloists (1993) for the posthumous realization of Cage’s final collaboration with Merce Cunningham, Ocean.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire