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bio
Van Stiefel (b. 1965, USA) is a composer/guitarist teaching music composition and theory, computer music, and 16th-century counterpoint at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
Primarily a performer-composer on electric guitar with laptop, his musical practice is one of teasing lyrical voices out of unusual instrumental combinations: electric guitar ensembles, laptop orchestras, turntables, as well as more conventional ensembles. "I am a contrapuntist at heart," he writes; "and though partial to minimalism, my pieces tend to cultivate competing threads more than layer post-minimal moods and textures. Many of [my pieces] refuse to adhere to a texture; they sprawl and suddenly contrast. I can't hide from the 19th century; it's a theory teacher's occupational hazard, I guess!"
Trained as a classical guitarist at an early age, Stiefel attended the Centro Flamenco Paco Pena in 1983 Cordoba, Spain. As a student at the Banff Centre for advanced musical studies in Canada, he fell under the influence of avant-garde composers Vinko Globokar and Robert Aitken, becoming forever drawn to contemporary music and the electric guitar. He has a BA/MM in guitar performance from Yale University where he studied with Ben Verdery, the maverick classical guitarist who later performed and recorded Stiefel's first serious composition: On Wet Roads on Autumn Nights, which Stiefel describes as: "Arvo Part and John Barry in a conversation about the Bach Chaccone."
In the mid-1990's, Stiefel was active as in the Atlanta area, producing many critically acclaimed new music events in concert venues and alternative settings. These events included performances by flutist-composer Anne Richardson (Indigo Girls), Charles Waters and Andrew Barker (The Gold Sparkle Band), Bill Taft (Smoke), Neil Fried, and Brian Halloran among others. In 1992, the Fernbank Museum of Natural History commissioned Stiefel to compose a new work and collaborate with James Oliverio to produce a concert of new music for its grand opening. Later, Stiefel's work "I Hear You Singing in the Wire," for originally-pressed vinyl disks, slide guitar and four turntables was commissioned by Ed Wooham's "Art in Odd Places," for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Festival.
Stiefel left Atlanta to pursue a doctorate in music composition at Princeton University studying with Steven Mackey and Paul Lansky. He took lessons in Max/MSP programming from then fellow graduate student Daniel Trueman and became hooked on programming custom processes and interactive improvisational spaces for live performance with guitar. He curated a series of composer talks, bringing Christian Marclay, Earle Brown, Philip Glass, Alvin Singleton, and Meredith Monk to Princeton. In 1999, Stiefel formed the Sap Dream Electric Guitar Quartet with Bryce Dessner, performing at Galapagos, the New York Guitar Festival and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. The group disbanded in 2003 after Stiefel moved to Montreal to teach theory and counterpoint at McGill University.
Stiefel has been a featured speaker at 2010 TEDx Phoenixville, appearing with the WCU Laptop Arts Ensemble. He returned to Princeton as visiting artist with PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra). In 2010, the Filament Festival at EMPAC (Rensselaer Polytechnic) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art both presented "already seen," an interactive music and dance collaboration with the Miller-Rothlein Company (MIRO) of Philadelphia. An earlier collaboration with MIRO and the folk-rock ensemble The Toy Soldiers was performed at the Kimmel Center. A first all-Stiefel CD, Solaris was released in 2011 on New Focus Recordings and is distributed by Naxos.