Board of directors
Aaron Krister Johnson envisioned UnTwelve in 2005, and eventually co-founded it with Christopher Bailey in 2007. Currently residing in Tucson, AZ, and most recently prior to that, Chicago, Aaron is an active virtuoso keyboardist and composer. An ever eclectic and multi-faceted artist, his experience and influences range from the Western classical tradition, folk music, jazz, and modern ambient and electro-acoustic free improvisation. The Chicago Sun-Times called his composition 'evocative', and his keyboard improvisations have been hailed by Keyboard Magazine as "challenging and creative". His work has been hailed by Chicagocritic.com, the Chicago Tribune, the Windy City Times, and the online music journal Tokafi.comAaron's music has been featured several times internationally in the 60x60 project, and at Electronic Music Midwest. He has collaborated with the Fine Arts Chamber Players, The Artistic Home, Lyric Opera, Lira Ensemble, Chicago Children's Choir, Kiltartan Road Ensemble, Lakeside Shakespeare, and the International Music Foundation, among others. Aaron has appeared 16 years straight in Chicago's annual Do It Yourself Messiah, on the stages of the Harris Theatre and the Lyric Opera, keeping the massive "audience choir" together from the manual of an organ. As a "crossover" classically-inspired pianist in a Celtic setting, other appearances include Chicago Irish Fest, Milwaukee Irish Fest, and the Old Town School of Folk music. From 1998-2012, he was the pianist, organist, and choir director at Temple Sholom of Chicago, the largest Reform Jewish congregation in Chicago, and home of a historic 4-manual Wurlitzer organ.
In 2003 he started writing music and designing sound for theatrical productions. His score for The Artistic Home's production of Peer Gynt was nominated for a 2005 Joseph Jefferson award for outstanding original incidental music for a play. Other credits with AH include Petrified Forest, Clash by Night, Madwoman of Chaillot and Natural Affection, and Lakeside Shakespeare of Michigan's productions of Twelfth Night and Julius Ceasar.
His education includes the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory division, SUNY 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.