David Morneau
From Sequenza21/NetNewMusic Wiki
David Morneau was born in 1975 in western New York state. He grew up in the Adirondack mountains (NY), has lived in Michigan and Ohio, and currently resides with his wife JoLayne in New York City.
Bio
(written by Anna Morneau, May 2008)
David Morneau does not compose his music with a ‘poetic power’ that emphatically discharges from his work enchanting you in a hallucinogenic state of borderline exaltation. He does not intensely attempt to infuse symbolism into his work and shows no melodic motivation whatsoever. This would not be David. So you ask, ‘Well, then what does this so-called proclaimed musical talent propose to do?’
David began playing the trombone when he was nine because it was shiny and had a slide. His excitement with the instrument grew when he realized he could literally spit out of the shiny bell and it was actually an acceptable action. Once he became quite good at the musical part of the trombone, he then realized his performance ability to charm and alarm all at once. He became elated at the idea of bringing something offbeat to the stage just to see how people would react. This would involve a lot more than just a trombone…you would need many more instruments! Jugglers! Dancers! Computers! And you can’t just find something offbeat and alarming like that on a shelf somewhere—that would mean someone else had already done it. It would be old news—expected and redundant. You find it in the produced works of David Morneau himself. (Where he found it remains a mystery to most.)
Just to clarify, David is not a trombone performer. He is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. He works in a variety of media and has an affinity for creative collaboration. Among his diverse projects are A/Break:1 – an experimental music video for choreographer Amiti Perry (http://modancer.com), The Rhythm Variations – 12 variations on Gershwin for solo piano, and The Clone Zone—a video game inspired dance theater collaboration with Anna Sullivan of Anatomical Scenario (http://anatomicalscenario.com) (winner of the Greater Columbus Arts Council 2008 Artist Excellence Award). Recently, David completed 60x365 (http://60x365.com), a podcast for which he composed a new sixty-second composition every day for a year.
Currently David is pursuing his Doctorate of Musical Arts degree at The Ohio State University under the supervision of Marc Ainger, Donald Harris, and David Bruenger. He received his Masters of Music in composition at Western Michigan University, under the direction of Richard Adams, Curtis Curtis-Smith and Robert Ricci, and his Bachelor of Music at Cornerstone University. His honors include 2006 Composer-In-Residence with the OSU Symphony Orchestra, 2004 Ruth Friscoe Prize in Composition for The Rhythm Variations (http://5of4.com/scores/rhythm.html), The Marilyn and Donald Harris Scholarship from OSU, and a Local Composer Series Grant from the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan (http://www.uica.org/).
You could say he’s crazy but credentialed, or credentially-crazed. Do not think of him as yet another one of those ‘unique composers’ but rather a provider of exclusive unprecedented experiments. He carries his charm and alarm, the glamour to make standards stammer, the appeal of the unreal. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Mr. David Morneau…also available at http://5of4.com.
