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Student

Ned McGowan

1473411177 nedmcgowan photo by michel marang
Started in: 2016
Musician type: composer, wind
University: Leiden University
Personal website: nedmcgowan.com
Nationality: United States / The Netherlands

McGowan was born in the United States in 1970 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1994. He is a composer, teacher, flutist, improviser and curator.

McGowan’s music strives for an idiom in which various musics – American popular, European classical and avant-garde, Carnatic, a fascination with proportionally intricate rhythms, the use of microtones in the search for new subtleties of melody – and many others, rub against each other and generate new meanings.” This is how musicologist Bob Gilmore describes composer Ned McGowan. His works have been performed throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia by the Radio Kamer Filharmonie, Sinfonia Rotterdam, American Composers Orchestra, musikFabrik, Ricciotti, Calefax, Zapp4, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Great Noise and his own band Hexnut. Ned McGowan teaches composition at the College for Arts, Media and Technology in Hilversum, Netherlands.

Project

Architectures of Speed: Reinventing the Tools, Functions and Potentials of Speed Within Rhythmical Frames in Music.

Started in 2016

The speed of rhythms in live acoustic music, literally the velocity at which notes are sounding, can be defined in absolute terms based on clock time. But there is also the perceived speed that, in the simplest terms, states that musical material can seem fast, slow or some other relational quality.

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