the basics:
Dan is a composing performer on both the 6-string electric violin and the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. His duo Trollstilt released its first CD of original tunes in 2000 and has performed widely at both contemporary music festivals and folk music festivals; Trollstilt has recently expanded and become QQQ. Dan also plays and teaches traditional Hardanger fiddle music.

Dan has been active as an experimental instrument designer and has built spherical speakers and the Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array, among other things. He co-founded and directs the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), an ensemble of laptop-ists with 6-channel spherical speakers and various control devices. He is a member of interface, an electronic improvisation ensemble. Their first CD, ./swank, was released in early 2001 and their DVD, RECORDING FIELD, H, with guest Pauline Oliveros, was released by the Deep Listening label in 2003.

While many of Dan's compositions are for his own ensembles, he also composes for various chamber ensembles and occasionally for orchestra. Several of his chamber works are included in his recent Bridge Records CD, Machine Language. A CD/DVD of his evening-length Five (and-a-half) Gardens (for So Percussion and Trollstilt, with animated paintings) will be released in the March of 2008 by So Percussion's new label Shhh Productions. Five (and-a-half) Gardenshas been presented at the Whitney Museum, the Third-Practice festival, and elsewhere.

recent work includes:
-- Lasso and Corral: Variations on an Ill-Formed Meter, for me (hardanger), Todd Reynolds (violin), Kathy Supove (piano), and Ken Thomson (bass clarinet), all with laptops and wacked-out audiovisual click-track thingy; premiered at NIME in NYC, subsequent performances at Banglewood and ICMC in Copenhagen.
-- a piano trio, Triptick, for the Society for New Music.
-- a solo cello piece, Scales and Metronomes, for Florent Renard-Payen.
-- several pieces for PLOrk.
-- the premiere of Traps Relaxed with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall (read about it here).

in the works:
-- a brand-spanking-new BoSSA, redesigned to be completely wireless (with integrated amplifier and CPU) and also to sound much better than the original.
-- music for QQQ! just about the most fun in the universe (for us anyhow).
-- more PLOrk madness, including a commission from turbulence.org, and a commission from the American Composers Orchestra, to premiere in April 2008 at Zankel. next year, PLOrk collaborates with Matmos!
-- and some big projects brewing with Janus, So Percussion, post-Post (Dan's new new band), and others....

obligatory creds:
Dan studied physics at Carleton College, composition and theory at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, and composition at Princeton University. He has taught at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and Colgate University. Dan joined the Music Department faculty at Princeton in the Fall of 2002, is associated faculty with the Princeton Computer Science Department, and was appointed Arthur Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor in the Fall of 2005. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

busy kids:
Dan is whipped by his 7-year-old daughter, Molly Clare, who is undoubtedly wicked-awesome-smaaht, and his 2.5 year-old red-head son, Otto Vincent, who is a force of nature (aka "the little viking").