ABOUT

*1970, Camden, Maine, USA

Sean Reed is an American composer who spent 20 years living and working in Europe (Hamburg, Germany; Dublin, Ireland; and Edinburgh, Scotland), and has recently returned to his native New England. He studied Music Education at the Eastman School of Music before studying Music Composition under Manfred Stahnke at the College of Music and Dramatic Arts in Hamburg, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. in Music Composition under Donnacha Dennehy at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where he also taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in orchestration, instrumental composition, and software for electroacoustic composition, both in the Music Department and within the Music and Media Technologies Programme (MMT).

Sean is active as a composer for instrumental ensembles as well as for interactive and fixed-media electroacoustic works and multimedia collaborations with other artists. His independent and collaborative works have been performed by soloists of the ensemble modern, within the zeitoper series of the Hanover State Opera, at the CYNETart, ISEA and ICMC festivals, the transmediale in Berlin, and at the EMPAC in Troy, NY. He has been awarded several prizes and stipends, including within the Nachwuchsforum of the German Society for Contemporary Music (GNM), by the INMM in Darmstadt, the Culture Committee of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, and his works have been broadcast on the DEGEM Webradio@ZKM.

Sean recently completed employment as a resarch technician within a 12-month AHRC project for the development of the algorithmic music composition software "slippery chicken" by Michael Edwards at the University of Edinburgh's Music Department, for which he wrote the documentation and programmed the test suite.

Sean's current pursuits consist of the development of his three composition software modules "muggulu", "skinnymalinks", and "arco", which are Lisp-based programs that assist in the analysis and creation of both instrumental and electroacoustic compositions.

Sean is a member of the Dublin Spatial Music Collective. His compositions are published by sumtone exclusive music publishers.