David Morneau
David Morneau is a composer of an entirely undecided genre. Described by Molly Sheridan as a “shining beacon” of inspiration, his diverse work illuminates ideas about our culture, issues concerning creativity , and even the very nature of music itself. His eclectic output includes Love Songs, an album of hybrid pop/art songs that combine Shakespeare’s Sonnets with contemporary poetry (described in NM421 as “elegantly rendered”), 60×365, a year-long podcast project for which he composed a new one- minute piece every day (labeled “impressive” by NPR’s All Things Considered), and Broken Memory, an album of noisy drones and beats extracted from a vintage Nintendo Gameboy . A review on Grindthieves International exclaims that Broken Memory “absolutely wrecks shop…. For that, David Morneau wins.”
His current projects include Not Less Than the Good, a secularized morning prayer service based on Henry Thoreau’s Walden, which is being composed for New Thread Quartet (a New York based saxophone ensemble) and will include field recordings made at Walden Pond and read excerpts from Thoreau’s book, and Photon Ecstasy, a collaborative concert-length spatial performance with composer Melissa Grey to premiere at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania and held in conjunction with the exhibition of artist Dan Rose’s DNA-Photon Project.
Morneau is Composer-in-Residence with Immigrant Breast Nest, a New York City netlabel. Morneau and Melissa Grey collaborate as l’Artiste ordinaire, creating compositions and performance projects and producing Soft Series, a series of soft premieres by composers and performers in a loft in the NoMad neighborhood in New York City.
[photo credit: Marc Fiaux]