Benjamin Thigpen

As a composer of electroacoustic music, Benjamin Thigpen has worked primarily in studios in France and Belgium: GRM (Paris), Recherches et Musiques (Brussels), CCMIX (Paris), and SCRIME (Bordeaux). He has also been an artist in residence at Djerassi (California), at l'Espace Totem (Montreal), and at the Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden). His music is performed in Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as on the web; it has been awarded mentions in various competitions (Musica Nova, Prix Noroit, Métamorphoses, Città di Udine, CIMESP).

As a composer of electroacoustic music, Benjamin Thigpen has worked primarily in studios in France and Belgium: GRM (Paris), Recherches et Musiques (Brussels), CCMIX (Paris), and SCRIME (Bordeaux). He has also been an artist in residence at Djerassi (California), at l'Espace Totem (Montreal), and at the Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden). His music is performed in Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as on the web; it has been awarded mentions in various competitions (Musica Nova, Prix Noroit, Métamorphoses, Città di Udine, CIMESP). He has received commissions from GRM, SCRIME, the French Ministry of Culture and Totem Contemporain, and is often invited to present his work at conferences and universities in Europe and the United States.

He studied composition, aesthetics, and computer music with Elaine Barkin, Samuel Weber, Christian Eloy, Curtis Roads, Julio Estrada and Horacio Vaggione; he has also earned degrees in English Literature, Comparative Literature and “Aesthetics, Technologies and Artistic Creations.” After working for nearly six years as a computer music instructor at Ircam (Paris), he is currently teaching digital signal processing, acoustics and psychoacoustics at the Conservatory of Cuneo, in Italy. His music is concerned with issues of energy, density, complexity, movement, simultaneity and violence, and he often works extensively with space as a primary compositional parameter. He thinks that music does not exist in time but rather creates it, and considers that music is not the art of sound but the art of the transcendence of sound. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL..