Department of Music

• Friday, October 19, 2012
• 107 Old Cabell Hall
• 3:30pm
• Free

Demystifying "difficult" music and making connections to build community in the 21st century.

In this colloquium, Nate Wooley talks about how the curatorial direction of DRAM (Database of
Recorded American Music) and the editorial decisions of Sound American are geared toward
finding different avenues of discussion for younger music fans. The aim of this work is to
overcome the stereotype that experimental is too “difficult” to be enjoyed by bridging gaps
between academic research and the vernacular and by finding new ways of viewing experimental
composition and improvisation.

Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performances. Nate moved to New York in 2001, and has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Beyond playing trumpet, Nate is a champion for the dissemination of new and experimental music. He is currently one of the curators of collections and archives at the Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM – dramonline.org). His recent projects include the preservation, digitization and presentation of the historic concerts at Phill Niblock's Experimental Intermedia space, Mills College of Contemporary Music, and the presentation of Ben Hall's epic southern gospel 45 collection. He has recorded numerous interviews with such musical iconoclasts as Eliane Radigue, Tom Johnson, Evan Parker, Anthony Coleman, Elliott Sharp and novelist Rick Moody for presentation in his groundbreaking series "The Listeners", available for streaming to the subscribers of DRAM. His essays have included work on the Edition Wandelweiser school of composition, Lee Hyla, Eliane Radigue, and Morton Feldman among others. This group of pieces is intended to find a middle ground of interest in new music between the grizzled veterans of abstract conceptual music in theory and practice and those that
may be discovering it for the first time.