Alden Jenks

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Alden Jenks (born 1940 in Michigan) is an American composer.

Alden Jenks received a B.A. from Yale University and an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied composition with Andrew Imbrie and Seymour Shifrin. He also studied composition in 1967 with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the University of California, Davis (Kramer 1998), and electronic music with David Tudor and Anthony Gnazzo.

As a performer, he served as a controller of the live electronics for Stockhausen’s 1967 Darmstadt collective-composition project, Ensemble (Gehlhaar 1968, 39 and 75), and performed on synthesizer in the 25th anniversary concert of Terry Riley's In C in 1989, released as a recording in 1995 on New Albion Records CD NA071.

As a composer he is primarily known for his work in electronic media, and is Professor of Composition and Director of the E. L. Wiegand Composition Studio at the San Francisco Conservatory. His most illustrious student is John Adams [1]. His composition Nagasaki won the Bourges Electronic Music Competition, and Marrying Music won the and Viotti-Valsesia International Music Competition award.

[edit] Compositions (selective list)

Ansichtskarte an Johann, for two pianos (2001)
Calcululations, MIDI composition
Femme Fatale: The Invention of Personality, incidental music for the play by Laura Farabough (1981)
MENAGE, for synthesizer, piano, and percussion
Marrying Music, for two pianos
Martin Put That Gun Away, electroacoustic music (2000)
Mummermusic, music for a mime act by Peter Kors (1974)
Nagasaki, electronic music
Ognaggio al'Anzzonio, electroacoustic music
Prelude, for organ
Sour Music (2002)
Those Long Canadian Winters, theatre music

[edit] Sources

Gehlhaar, Rolf. 1968. Zur Komposition Ensemble: Kompositionsstudio Karlheiz Stockhausen, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt 1967. Darmstadter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 11, ed. Ernst Thomas. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne.
Kramer, Jonathan. 1998. "Karlheinz in California." Perspectives of New Music 36, no. 1 (Winter): 247–61.