Biography
Post-minimalist composer Rhys Chatham, a key presence in New York’s downtown scene, encountered music from childhood onward. He trained on classical flute and performed pieces by Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez while still in his early teens, precisely when he first took up composition that included serial techniques. During college he met Morton Subotnick, an encounter that prompted him to begin creating electronic music; at NYU’s Studio for Electronic Music he also worked alongside Eliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, and Ingram Marshall. In the 1970s he adopted just intonation for his pieces and supported himself by tuning instruments, occasionally bartering the service for lessons, as he did with LaMonte Young. At the same time he performed in Young’s Dream House ensemble and in a separate project alongside Tony Conrad. Toward the end of the decade Chatham started folding rock influences into his output and shifted toward non-notated structures. Electric guitars became central to this direction after he witnessed the Ramones at CBGB’s, an experience that sparked his enduring interest in the instrument. His initial guitar composition, “Guitar Trio,” received its premiere from a group that featured Glenn Branca; the works were typically performed at extreme volume so that overtones—sometimes resembling vocal timbres—would emerge, though the intensity also produced tinnitus for Chatham by the early 1980s. Among his best-known guitar pieces are “Drastic Classicism” (1982), scored for four guitars in alternate tunings, and the 1989 symphony “An Angel Moves Too Fast to See,” written for one hundred electric guitars plus bass and drums. Bill Brovold, later founder of Larval, and Robert Poss of Band of Susans both participated in realizations of these large-scale works. Chatham simultaneously began writing for brass, as in “Factor X,” while returning to fully notated scores. After many years in New York he moved to Paris. He also integrated his own trumpet playing—frequently processed through electronic effects—after roughly ten years of study on the instrument. The trumpet can be heard on Hard Edge (1999, Wire Editions) and on Neon (1996, NTone), a collaboration with Martin Wheeler. In the late 1990s he joined Bronx DJ and ex-Swans drummer Jonathan Kane to form the group Septile.
Albums
Singles
