Room Piece XI

Michael J. Schumacher is a composer, performer and installation artist from New York City. He works predominantly with electronic and digital media, specializing in computer generated sound environments which evolve continuously for long time periods. He imbues these self-creating structures with an abundance of sonic material, resulting in forms that flow through a wide range of moods, timbral combinations and textural densities. In their realization, Schumacher uses multiple speaker configurations which relate the sounds of the installation to the architecture of the exhibition space. Architectural and acoustical considerations thereby become basic structural elements. For these compositions, Schumacher has worked with instrumentalists Tim Barnes, Anthony Burr, Charles Curtis, Jane Henry, Kato Hideki, Rebecca Moore, David Shively, Peter Zummo and others, recording and manipulating their sounds. Schumacher’s sound installations have been heard at Art in General, Apex Art, PS 1, The Kitchen, the Queens Museum and Sculpture-Center in New York City, CCNOA in Brussels, the Technical University and Podewil in Berlin, the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt , the Museum of Modern Art in Lyon, Triskel Intermedia in Cork, Ireland, Transmissions Festival in Chicago, SFIFEM in Sante Fe, the Waveform Festival in Sydney, Via 7 Festival in Paris, and others. Schumacher has been a close associate of the ground breaking composer La Monte Young since 1989 and has worked as a producer of events at the Dream House, Young’s and Marian Zazeela’s installation space in Tribeca. In this capacity he has produced concerts of classical Indian music as well as sound installations and concerts of contemporary music by composers associated with Young, such as Terry Jennings and Richard Maxfield. He has also worked as technical director of the Dream House and as a recording engineer at Dream House events. Since 1996, Schumacher has pioneered, first at his downtown gallery Studio Five Beekman and, since 2000, at Diapason Gallery located in midtown, sound art in New York City, by giving over 100 artists the opportunity to present, in environments with high quality multi-channel sound systems and free of outside noise, cutting edge installations with sound as their focus. He has produced premieres by David Behrman, David First, Tetsu Inoue, Ron Kuivila, Steve Roden, Marina Rosenfeld and Stephen Vitiello, to name a few. A complete listing of past presentations and upcoming events is viewable online at www.diapasongallery.org. Schumacher is a frequent collaborator with the video artist Ursula Scherrer, with whom he founded Studio Five Beekman. Their works have appeared in many festivals, including Media Test Wall at MIT in Cambridge, the Dissonanze in Rome, the 9e Biennale de l’Image en Movement in Geneva, and the BAC 36 Int’l Film and Video Festival at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Schumacher has published six solo CDs, a duo CD with Donald Miller, and an LP with Miller and Charles Curtis. He is on the Sub Rosa anthology of noise and electronic music and the lower case 2002 compilation, as well as on an LP of remixes of music by Oren Ambarchi on the Touch label. Schumacher’s CD "Room Pieces", on the XI label, was rated best of 2003 for “modern composition” by The Wire magazine. Schumacher has lectured at Bard College, The New School, The School for Visual Arts and Juilliard. He taught electronic music at the Center for Media Arts in New York City in the mid 1980s. He has taught piano, composition, theory and ear training privately since 1983. Schumacher was awarded the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Grant in 2001. He has also received awards and residencies from NYFA, Harvestworks, Rennsellaer Polytechnic Institute, Meet the Composer and others. Schumacher has degrees in music composition from Indiana University, where he won the composition prize in 1982, and the Juilliard School, where he earned the doctorate in 1988. His teachers have been Stanley Applebaum, Seymour Bernstein, Bernhard Heiden, John Eaton, John Ogden, Shigeo Neriki, La Monte Young and Vincent Persichetti. Born in 1961 in Washington, DC, he has lived in New York since 1983.