Curtis Macdonald

Biography

Macdonald comes from a planned community 40 miles west of Los Angeles, California. He started playing at age five, and got into local bands as a teenager. This gave him the opportunity to realize his early compositions until the advent of MIDI which then allowed him to realize compositions via a computer. As a student at Cal Arts, he received valuable tutelage from Morton Subotnick, Alan Chaplin, Barry Schrader and Academy Award winning composer Leonard Rosenman. He also received influential advice from composers John Cage, Morton Feldman and Milton Babbitt. After graduating, Macdonald recalled the influences he had growing up, Vince Guaraldi, Bill Evans, Bob James and Vangelis and fused his educated ideas with these early influences and began his stylistic approach to instrumental music. Along the way he supplemented his income by composing music for industrial videos that then led to composing library music and understanding the business of licensing intellectual property. His love of jazz and composition allowed him to express and instruct others during the 1990s while honing his personal sound. With the birth of the Electronica genre, Macdonald began to cross pollinate his ideas of jazz and new age with the endless pallet of sonic textures synthesizers had to offer. Utilizing certain sounds that would become a staple in his orchestration, his sound of transparency and floating delay underscoring the melody performed by an acoustic piano would constitute an original style.

Discography