Common Sense: HALLE

John Halle is an assistant professor of music at Yale University. He has studied with Fred Lerdahl at Columbia, Andrew Imbrie at UC Berkeley, and at the University of Michigan with William Bolcom and William Albright. He has also studied privately with John Harbison in Italy and at Tanglewood. Halle's music includes Operation Chaos commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Structural Adjustment for the Common Sense Composers' Collective, recorded on the group's first CD on the CRI label and Softshoe for brass quintet, recorded on the Meridian Arts Ensemble's Channel Classics CD Smart Went Crazy. His recent work includes Gaze premiered at the Chamber Music of Lincoln Center Double exposure series and Mortgaging the Earth on a text by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers premiered by the New York new music ensemble Sequitur. For many years a jazz pianist in San Francisco and New York, he has performed with Sonny Stitt, Tom Harrell, Mark Levine and Woody Shaw. He has also performed widely as a new music pianist having premiered works by American composers in Russia, Estonia, Germany, at the Bang on the Can Festival in New York, on recordings by Julia Wolfe and Evan Ziporyn and at composer's concerts at Columbia and Princeton. An a occasional writer on music, Halle has published collaborative work with Fred Lerdahl on the relationship of musical and linguistic generative grammars. He is currently working with Edward Harsh on "Themes and Provocations" a selection of interviews with and essays about younger composers.

Contact him at John.Halle@Yale.edu.

Structural Adjustments from Common Sense
Hear an Excerpt

"Structural Adjustments was written during a period when I was trying to come to terms with what Hindemith called the "vast sewage system" of market oriented musics which constitute the basis of my (dare I say most of our) formative musical experiences. Whether the relationship to bubblegum pop, TV show themes, or advertising jingles is one of bemused contempt or resigned enthusiasm, for me the influence is omnipresent and, in this piece at least, celebrated pretty explicitly."

Spooks
from The Shock of the Old
Hear an Excerpt

"Spooks are assets of our intelligence services which infiltrate suspect activist political and labor organizations and attempt to foment self destructive extremism and internal discord. All of the major themes of this piece are spooks in this sense in that they are not the friends they appear on the listener's initial encounter with them. Of course, our intelligence community has long since abandoned any involvement in these sorts of 'excesses.'"

dan BECKER