Pieter Snapper

“Malifornia” (2001)

Malifornia was an attempt to reclaim a space filled with associations of discomfort and trauma (my Father’s house) by sampling all its characteristic noises and recasting them in a context where I felt empowered to give them new meanings. As such, the piece was originally intended purely as a therapeutic exercise, and though successful in that guise, as the work grew it also developed its own identity as a concert work. Besides the obvious grafting of the negative ‘mal-’ prefix onto ‘California,’ the title also has a number of darker resonances in Turkish.

Biography

Pieter Snapper (b.1967) is an American composer and tonmeister whose works have been widely played throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia by groups such as KammarensembleN in Stockholm, and Klangforum in Vienna. He has garnered awards from BMI, ASCAP, UC Berkeley, The Union League Foundation, and commissions from such organizations as the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, The Yamaha Corporation of America, the ensemble Eighth Blackbird, and the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. Principal composition teachers included Andrew Imbrie and Edwin Dugger at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ralph Shapey and Howard Sandroff at the University of Chicago. He has performed and toured extensively as a player of live and interactive computer music. As a tonmeister, Snapper has worked with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra in Bonn, WFMT radio, TRT, and the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra. His music is available on the Cristal and Gasparo record labels. Snapper taught composition and music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music before joining the faculty at Istanbul Technical University's MIAM (Center for Advanced Musical Research) where he teaches composition and Sound Engineering/Design and is the head Tonmeister and recording director of the MIAM Studios.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.