Board of directors
Aaron Krister Johnson is a Tucson-based composer and musician. Primarily weaned on classical music as a pianist through his maternal grandfather and subsequent studies, he also experienced classic rock, jazz, and electronic music at an early age, later devouring various world ethnic traditions, Medieval and Renaissance music, and Minimalism. His interest in tuning was piqued by an encounter as a teen with Terry Riley's Shri Camel. His experience as a performer ranges from the Western classical keyboard tradition to folk music groups, as well as to modern electro-acoustic free improvisation. His improvisations have been hailed by Keyboard Magazine as "challenging and creative". His work has appeared on NPR and has been lauded by chicagocritic.com, the Chicago Tribune, the Windy City Times, and the online music journal tokafi.com. Aaron's score for Peer Gynt was called "evocative" by the Chicago Sun-Times and was nominated for a 2005 Joseph Jefferson Award for outstanding original incidental music for a play. In 2019, his 2003 electronic 19-edo work The Juggler (2003) received a live acoustic performance by Ensemble SCALA in Amsterdam.Aaron is both a founder and co-artistic director of UnTwelve, a group dedicated to encouraging musical practice in alternative tunings. Through the UnTwelve organization, Aaron collaborated with 60x60 as a music director, or "macro-composer", to create the 60x60 UnTwelve Mix, which contained 60 one-minute works with a theme of microtonality. UnTwelve continues to promote tuning-aware activity through the hosting of international composer competitions, concert events, and articles and interviews with tuning-aware artists on untwelve.org.
During the 2020 Covid pandemic, Aaron, his wife (mezzo-soprano Amy Pickering), and his daughter Annika relocated from Chicago to Tucson, AZ. During the day, Aaron works as a software engineer at a Chicago-based financial company. His deep interests in technology in general and audio tech has led to the development of his own software, including a new programming language, dclang. He continues to develop his music by playing with electronic composition software and analog modular synths, sometimes producing ambient works under the moniker filtercreed. He has maintained his classical piano chops as well--currently surveying the entire Well-Tempered Clavier of J.S. Bach, and in 2015 released a recording of the complete Musica Callada of Catalan composer Federico Mompou.
He originally received his education at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory division, the State University of New York at Purchase (BFA Magna Cum Laude) and Northwestern University (MFA Magna Cum Laude) for his graduate studies.
A (growing) sampling of his works (post-dismantling of his old webpage) is available here and here.
Christopher Bailey co-founded UnTwelve in October of 2007, when it was first named "MidwestMicrofest" at its inaugural concert. He is a composer (and, occasionally, performer) of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, and his interest in microtonality bloomed in the late '90s. Nowadays, he sees microtonality as a basic fact of contemporary composition in a wide variety of styles and aesthetics, similar to the fact that it is more vivid to see the world in color than in black-and-white.Born outside of Philadelphia, PA, Christopher Bailey's first ambition was to take over the world with an army of robots of his own devising. He quickly discovered that this would take too much work, though, and so he turned to music composition in his late 'teens, studying first at the Eastman School of Music, and later at Columbia University.
Recent performances of his music occurred in Taiwan, Germany, Montreal, New York, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Minneapolis, and in Seoul, Korea, where he was a 2nd-Prize recipient in the International Composers Competition. Other awards include prizes from BMI and ASCAP, and the Bearns Prize. For more information, mp3's, software, and fun, informative and interactive paraphernalia, see his webpage..
Jacob A. Barton started composing at age 5, which, along with his parents' unwavering support, made it possible to release a 10-year retrospective album at age 15. He has studied composition with Kurt Grossman, BJ Leidermann, Timothy Bandy, Andrey Kasparov, Karim Al-Zand, Kurt Stallmann, Edward Applebaum, and Arthur Gottschalk. He has a Bachelor of Music degree from Rice University. He received a BMI Student Composer Award in 2006 for composing Xenharmonic Variations on a Theme by Mozart for microtonal player piano.Jacob tends to write music for his friends and/or himself to play. He plays piano reluctantly, and many wind instruments wishing they could do microtones more easily. He avidly collects odd musical instruments and hoards raw materials for making new ones. One such instrument is the "udderbot", a slide bottle discovered in 2005.
He has performed in New York, Houston, and Ann Arbor in An Exciting Event, an ensemble which takes microtonality as seriously as it takes puppetry and round-singing. He has participated in the Garden Performance Project, a series of workshops and concerts which elicit and present new local musics among neighbors, and the School for Designing a Society, a project for making formulation, especially formulation of desires, relevant to now (and vice versa).
Jacob's interest in microtonality is driven by its persistent (and juicy) problems: What is it, exactly? Who notices and who doesn't and why? What can I make out of it? How can the difficult bits become easy? And then what happens? To pursue these questions socially, Jacob has started such projects as Thirty-one Tone Singing Camps, the Seventeen Tone Piano Project, the Xenharmonic Wiki, and Make Microtonal Music Day. UnTwelve's camps owe their inspiration to his work organizing and shaping a community around microtonal activities and co-incubation.
Bruce Hamilton (b. 1966) composes and performs music in a variety of genres. His music is published by Non Sequitur Music and can be heard on the Albany, Amaranth, and/OAR, black circle, blank space, Capstone, Ilse, [ink | fuel], Linear Obsessional, Memex, Phill, SEAMUS, Spectropol, split-notes, Three Legs Duck and Mark labels. Hamilton's creative output is eclectic, exploring multiple styles and genre hybrids. He has received honors, awards and commissions from ALEA III, AMC, ASCAP, PAS, Barlow Endowment, Carbondale Community Arts, Indiana University, Jerome Foundation, National Society of Arts and Letters, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Whatcom Symphony, Russolo-Pratella Foundation, and SEAMUS. Recent performances of his music have included those at the NWEAMO Festival, ICMC, Friends of Rain, Electronic Music Midwest, JMU Contemporary Music Festival, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the Percussive Arts Society International Convention.
Recently completed commissions include Attractors (piano, vibes & electronic sound-2013) for Iktus+; Night Trips (percussion duo & electronic sound-2012) for Drumartica; Motion Stasis (drum set & electronic sound-2012) for Wesley Stephens; and Hennecker's Ditch Fantasy (acousmatic text-sound-2014) for The News Agents on Resonance FM. Over the past nine years Hamilton has performed laptop-based electroacoustic music under various monikers at the Decibel Festival, Hempfest, Sonarchy Radio, and other venues around the Pacific Northwest. His most recent full-length albums are drams, released on Linear Obsessional (UK) in December 2012, Compulse (as Skiks), released on split-notes in October 2011; and mash hits vol. 1, released on Spectropol in January 2012. A new ambient album is set for release in summer 2014.
A graduate of Indiana University (BM, MM, DM), Hamilton is Associate Professor of Music at Western Washington University, where he teaches music theory, composition, and directs the electroacoustic music studio (WWEAMS). He is a co-organizer of the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival, a board member of Make.Shift and the Washington Composers Forum, and runs the Spectropol netlabel. Hamilton lives in Bellingham with composer Lesley Sommer and their son Miles.