An Interview with Edmund Campion

Edmund J. Campion was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1957. (See Figure 1.) He received a doctorate in composition at Columbia University and attended the Paris Conservatory where he worked with composer Gérard Grisey. In 1993, Campion was selected for the one-year course in computer music at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique (IRCAM). He was eventually commissioned by IRCAM for his work Natural Selection and the evening-length dance piece Playback with choreographer François Raffinot. In 1995, Hillary Clinton presented him with the Rome Prize in Music Composition at the White House.

Mr. Campion is currently Associate Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley, where he serves as the Co-Director of The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). He has been recipient of the Nadia Boulanger Award, the Paul Fromm Award at Tanglewood, a Charles Ives Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Fulbright scholarship for study in France. Upcoming projects include a Fromm Foundation commission for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, a work in 2005 for the percussion sextet Les Percussion de Strasbourg, and a new interactive computer environment with violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg. This interview was conducted from 15 December 2003 to 25 May 2004 by electronic mail.

Makan: When did you first begin working with music technology, and what was the attraction?

Campion: As a graduate student at Columbia in the mid to late 1980s, I cut tape with Mario Davidovsky and saw the advent of the personal computer. The results of using a MIDI-based studio and simple computer-assisted techniques blew my mind! When I moved to Paris in 1989, Gérard Grisey encouraged me to apply these methods to acoustic composition. The outcome, A Complete Wealth of Time (ACWOT) for two pianos, was unlike any music I had ever written. Since then, the computer has been my playground and teacher, a testing site for ideas. The questions I ask, the pieces I write, the locations I choose for musical presentation have all been rethought. It's easy to get lost in technical issues, but my focus remains music creation. Rhythm, timbre, and spatial studies are central. Still, I've always felt a need to contextualize my artistic output in relation to the larger social picture. None of us wants to live in a computer music ghetto.

Makan: How did working with two such different figures as Davidovsky and Grisey challenge you as a young composer?

Campion: Davidovsky was New York; Grisey was Paris. The clash of those two musical cultures was as much a challenge as anything. But what good fortune to experience such well-formed and contrasting points of view! Both were highly critical of my work; that made the difference. Grisey and I became lasting friends, and it was a meaningful coincidence that I came to teach at the University of California at Berkeley where he had been a professor long before. Now that he's gone, I miss him.

Makan: What sort of musical parameters were you exploring with your early attempts at computer-assisted composition?

Campion: I was shuffling pitch class sets, rhythmic models, and timbre assignments inside a graphical sequence editor. I based everything on immediate perceptual feedback, which dovetailed with my interest in improvisation. I wanted to compose complex structures while at the same time avoiding the typical university-based music that surrounded me. So the project was defined: to marry the strengths of formal composition with the flexibility and adaptability of free improvisation. The instrumental suite A Treasured Collection of Eddies (AT-COE) was the piece.

Makan: You studied and worked for several years at IRCAM. How did this experience change you as a composer?

Figure 1.

Edmund Campion. Photo courtesy Kathleen Karn.

Campion: My technological naïveté ended with the IRCAM course in computer music in 1994. That year I wrote Losing Touch for vibraphone and multi-channel tape (Editions Billaudot, Paris). Losing paved the road for several future IRCAM commissions. The IRCAM people that...