My History

Seth Clark has been writing music for 22 years, after waking up one morning as an adult and deciding to become a composer. At that point he had almost no formal musical training in his background, but figured he could make up for lost time if he simply avoided television for the next few years.

His initial apprenticeship was with the seminal software company Intelligent Music, led by the composer Joel Chadabe. This firm was the first to offer commercially viable applications which incorporated aspects of artificial intelligence into their composing tools, programs which prefigure such current algorithmic composition software as David Cope’s Emily Howell. During this time Chadabe taught him the fundamentals of electronic music synthesis, algorithmic composition and MIDI. This was the period during which MIDI sequencing was just beginning to change the way recorded music is assembled, creating a huge paradigm shift in the music industry that exists to this day. Clark was impressed by Chadabe’s unusual approach to composition and sequencing, and continued using Intelligent Music software for the next two decades.

At the same time he began studying classical guitar technique. He also began working in earnest with the electric guitar, very much bolstered by receiving a Paul Reed Smith guitar from his parents as a college graduation present.

Four years later he was studying at Mills College under Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne and Maryanne Amacher. Here he began working with direct digital synthesis, utilizing programs like Csound, HyperUpic, RT and the Phase Vocoder to study and alter the morphology of sounds. He utilized these programs and traditional tape manipulations to forge what he sees as an alchemical approach to sound design. “I get excited when I can take some ugly sound and, using the right tools, transform it into something sublime. It’s a sort of practical magic that I like to inject into my music.” Clark’s thesis concert involved several transmogrifications of violent sounds from the movie Reservoir Dogs.

During his time in the Bay Area, he also studied and for a time lived with Grant Miller of Mandible Chatter. Mandible Chatter’s first cassette release, SERENADE FOR ANTON, was recorded in Clark’s living room on California Street, much to the chagrin of his ex-wife. Miller drilled Clark on the fundamentals of fingerpicking the guitar, and introduced him to The Residents, “Balkanized” cover versions of Beatles songs, The Incredible String Band and Minh’s Garden on Clement Street, which is still Clark’s favorite restaurant.

Studying with Maryanne Amacher spurred Clark’s interest in sounds that were allowed to evolve over increasingly lengthy time-frames. These could be meditative drone sounds, or, in Amacher’s case, a transmission of natural soundscapes processed in real time. He became fascinated with the degree to which the listener’s mental and emotional states were altered by submitting to one of Amacher’s installations over a long period. This led him to look at musical time in a new way, in which a single sound is allowed to spread out, morph, and elaborate on itself over the course of several minutes.

He in turn then became interested in the study of Transformative Music, or the power of music to alter consciousness, an area of inquiry which meshed in some fascinating ways with his alchemical approach to sound design. He is in the final stages of mastering his first electronic CD of Transformative Music, entitled MANTIS. This will be Clark’s first album devoted entirely to attempts to alter consciousness through strictly sonic means.

The year after completing his graduate studies found him teaching sound design and MIDI fundamentals at Cogswell Polytechnical College. It was at Cogswell that Clark developed his theory of Mutation Synthesis, a method of digital sound synthesis that uses a fast switching mechanism to alternate between two or more simple waveforms. When the switch alternates between these at a frequency faster than the input waveforms’ frequency, the resulting output will be a complex waveform sculpted from alternating pieces of the input. This is a result of jumping back and forth several times during the period of each input waveform. During his time at Cogswell, his students included Doug Wright of Sonoma Wire Works and the composer Patty Liu.

Initially drawn to the piano as a compositional tool because of its contrapuntal versatility, Clark now composes primarily for the guitar. Although as he puts it, “I’m basically an acoustic fingerstylist, so I guess I’ve just taken to playing the guitar like it’s a piano.” His first solo guitar album of original compositions is slated to be recorded this summer.