David A Jaffe

Biography

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Jaffe grew up in a musical family, with his father a gifted mandolinist. He began studying violin at an early age with violin pedagogue Samuel Applebaum. He studied guitar and oboe, and taught himself 5-string banjo, mandolin, electric bass and cello. He played in folk, rock and jazz bands and began composing in high school, including works for string quartet and symphonic band.

From 1973 to 1975, he toured with the eclectic bluegrass band Bottle Hill, often arranging and composing for the group, incorporating elements of jazz and contemporary music. He also recorded and toured with such innovative bluegrass musicians such as Tony Trischka and Stacy Philips.

He attended Ithaca College, where he studied composition with Karel Husa; then Bennington College, where he studied composition, orchestration and counterpoint with Henry Brant and electronic music with Joel Chadabe, receiving a B.A. in music and math in 1978. (Other composition teachers from that time period included Vivian Fine and Marta Ptaszynska. He also studied violin with Jacob and Lilo Glick.)

He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stanford University in 1983, where he was part of the computer music group at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, then later CCRMA (the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). He worked with faculty and colleagues John Chowning, Leland C. Smith, Julius O. Smith and others. In addition to his musical work, he did pioneering research in physical modeling, ensemble timing and other aspects of computer music.

He has since maintained multiple parallel careers as a composer, researcher and music software developer.

Composing career

Jaffe has taught composition at Stanford, the University of California San Diego, Princeton University and Melbourne University, where he was the MacGeorge Fellow. His music has been issued on ten CDs, including four solo CDs from Well-Tempered Productions, and has been presented by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Chanticleer, Earplay and numerous choruses, string quartets and other chamber ensembles. His music has been featured at international music festivals, including the Berlin Festival, the Bergen Festival, the ISCM Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Venice Biennale, the Bourges Festival, the American Festival in London, the Music in the Americas festival in Buenos Aires and the Spring in Havana Festival. His works have been broadcast internationally as part of the WGBH radio program "Art of the States." He has received numerous commissions from ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, the Russian National Orchestra, American Guild of Organists, the Lafayette String Quartet, and Chanticleer, for whom he was the N.E.A. Composer-in-Residence in 1990. (He also received N.E.A. Composer Fellowships in 1982 and 1991, as well as a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2001.) His music is published by Schott Music, Plucked String Editions and Terra Non Firma Press (BMI.)

Musical approach

His musical approach carries forward the innovative spirit of the late American composer Henry Brant (a close friend and mentor), as well as that of Carl Ruggles and Charles Ives. Often based on interrelationships, juxtaposition, and synthesis, Jaffe’s works frequently merge abstract and "representational" material, and draw upon such varied sources as world music, jazz, and historical Western concert styles. Jaffe is credited with pioneering and defining a "maximalist" approach to composition.

In addition, his works often draw upon extra-musical elements such as bird song (in such works as “Impossible Animals,” in which a bird sings with a synthesized human voice”) and political issues (in works such as “No Trumpets, No Drums” based on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.)

Several of his recent pieces have focused on the Afro-Cuban musical tradition, including "Underground Economy," for Cuban jazz pianist Hilario Duran, with violin and interactive electronics; and “Bull’s Eye,” for violin, cello and Afro-Cuban percussion.

Jaffe himself is a mandolinist and violinist and frequently performs such diverse styles as Afro-Cuban charanga, bluegrass, and klezmer, as well as in his own works. He has shared the stage with bluegrass greats Mike Marshall, Tony Trischka and Vassar Clements.

Orchestration and instrumentation

Orchestration is a primary compositional determinant in Jaffe's music; that is, the orchestration is a basic part of the plan of the piece. His instrumentation is often distinctive, focusing on relationships between timbres rather than instruments. He tends to seek large orchestral sounds, even in the context of chamber music. He has a particular fondness for plucked strings, as in City Life, for mandolin, guitar, harpsichord and 5-string banjo.

In addition, he has frequently written for unusual homogeneous instrumental combinations. Works in this vein include Celebration and Remembrance for 3 piccolos, 4 C flutes, 2 alto flutes and bass flute, Who's on First? for five double-basses, and May All Your Children Be Acrobats for eight guitars, voice and electronics.

Other unusual combinations include A Little Kid Sees a Skyscraper for two quarter-tone-tuned guitars; Would You Just As Soon Sing As Make That Noise??, a double-concerto for mandolin, violin and orchestra; and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, for Radio-drum-performed piano, mandolin, guitar, harp, bass, harpsichord, harmonium and two percussionists.

Development of Silicon Valley Breakdown

In 1981, Jaffe received a commission from guitarist David Starobin to write a work for eight guitars, voice and tape. When he returned to Stanford in the fall of 1981, he began work on the computer part. As part of the composition of the tape part, he strove to use Chowning’s FM synthesis technique to simulate plucked strings, as a way of bridging the sonic gulf between the live guitars and the tape, but had only partial success. Then a fortuitous event occurred. While playing the Mozart piano quartet, he mentioned to the violist, Alex Strong, that he was working on guitar synthesis. Strong excitedly told him about a new technique he had discovered. After appropriate non-disclosure forms had been signed (Strong was applying for a patent), he brought Jaffe into his confidence and showed him the technique. Jaffe was impressed with the clarity and realism of the technique and Strong allowed Jaffe to use it in his composition. Returning to CCRMA, Jaffe began working with the technique, but quickly ran into its limitations. He began innovating and extending the technique to solve problems of tuning, dynamics, expression, and many other issues, in collaboration with electrical engineering PhD student, Julius Smith.

After the premiere of “May All Your Children Be Acrobats,” which combined the new technique and the FM synthesis-based method, Jaffe decided to tackle a work for four-channel tape alone, further exploiting the plucked string synthesis techniques. The result, Silicon Valley Breakdown, was premiered at the Venice Biennale in 1983 and has been performed in over twenty-five countries. It is widely regarded as a landmark work in the field [this is a sample of available references].

At the same time, he and Smith presented a seminal paper on the technique at the 1983 International Computer Music Conference. This paper was then published back-to-back with the Karplus/Strong paper in Computer Music Journal. The paper has also appeared in book form in “The Music Machine,” by MIT Press.

Silicon Valley Breakdown also included innovations in simulated ensemble synchronization and the development of the Time Map. This work is described in the article Ensemble Aspects of Computer Music, published in Computer Music Journal.

The finale from the piece was featured in The Digital Domain, one of the first compact discs ever made, created to showcase the new technology. It was released by Elektra/Asylum in 1983. The work has also been released on several CDs, including XXIst century mandolin and Dinosaur Music.

The Radio-Drum and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Since 1990, he has written extensively for an innovative electronic controller called the "Radio-drum," (aka radiodrum) originally developed by Bob Boie and Max Mathews as a three-dimensional mouse at Bell Labs. Jaffe has used in such works as the massive "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World," hailed by Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle for the "resourceful intricacy and variety of Jaffe's writing". These works have been developed in close collaboration with percussionist/composer Andrew Schloss. Jaffe and Schloss describe their approach in a number of articles, including The Computer-Extended Ensemble, published in Computer Music Journal in 1994.

In Racing Against Time, for Radio-drum-controlled electronics, two saxophones, two violins and piano, Jaffe used the SynthCore sound engine (designed at Staccato Systems, Inc.) to synthesize physical models of electric guitar, jet fly-by, and car engine effects.

Other works for Radio-drum include Underground Economy, for Cuban improvising pianist, violinist and Radio-drum; and Wildlife, for Zeta violin and Radio-drum.

Jaffe has also written for the Radio Baton (of Max Mathews), a close relative of the Radio-drum, in such works as Terra Non Firma, for four cellos and Radio Baton-conducted electronics.

Most recently, he collaborated with Seattle sound artist/inventor Trimpin to create The Space Between Us.

The Space Between Us, a tribute to Henry Brant

Jaffe first met Trimpin in Seattle through Andrew Schloss, who was in the process of commissioning a work from Jaffe (with support from the Canada Arts Council) for Radio-drum-controlled piano and string quartet. However, in view of the similarity to the The Seven Wonders..., Jaffe was searching for a way to transform the project into one that would explore new territory. The answer came after Henry Brant's death, when he inherited Brant's percussion instruments (18 chimes, a xylophone and a glockenspiel.) He traveled to Santa Barbara to visit Brant's widow and pack up the instruments for shipping, and learned that Trimpin had also inherited some of Brant's instruments (Trimpin and Brant had been planning a collaboration that never came to fruition.) Jaffe approached Trimpin with a proposal to transform the Brant instruments into robotic contraptions. The piece took its final form when Charles Amirkhanian and Other Minds joined the commission consortium, along with a grant from the James Irvine Foundation. The instrumentation was augmented to include a second string quartet. In The Space Between Us, the chimes are hung from the ceiling above the audience, the xylophone is split in two and placed at the extreme left and right of the stage and the glockenspiel and a Disklavier piano are on stage. All of the percussion and piano are controlled by the Radio-drum and the strings are positioned in the aisles surrounding the audience, with two cellos in the extreme rear of the hall, followed (rear-to-front) by violas, violins II and violins I. The work was premiered on March 4, 2011 at the 2011 Other Minds Festival in San Francisco. In his program notes Jaffe wrote that the piece "explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another.". Reviews of the concert can be found at the following references: and. The work was subsequently performed at Open Space in Victoria, BC, Canada (2013) and on the Wayward Music Series at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle (2016). The latter was supported by a grant from New Music USA the Nonsequitur.

Impossible Animals and other works influenced by the natural world

Jaffe is an avid birder and has incorporated elements of bird-song and bird behavior into many of his works. Perhaps the most involved example is Impossible Animals in which the song of a Winter Wren (the bird with the longest song of any North American bird) was subjected to an extensive analysis and resynthesis procedure and eventually rendered as a human voice with vowels derived from the pitch trajectory. This procedure is described in Jaffe's article Impossible Animals, Notes on birds and musical style, published in 1995 in Perspectives of New Music.

Other nature-inspired pieces include Territory for two violins, Bird Seasons for four voices, Whoop For Your Life! for orchestra and Bristlecone Concerto for violin and ensemble (also versions for violin, mandolin, ensemble and computer-generated tape; and mandolin and computer-generated tape.)

Music and audio software

From 1988 to 1991, Jaffe worked at Steve Job's start-up company NeXT, developing music software for the NeXT Computer. As the first computer to ship with a DSP capable of real-time sound synthesis, Jaffe and Julius Smith collaborated to create a programmable environment called the Music Kit, which fused elements of Music 5 and MIDI in an object-oriented environment.

In the mid-1990s, he developed the sound for games such as Welcome to West Feedback, and Quest for Fame, collaborating with bands such as Aerosmith, for the Boston-based company Ahead (later Virtual Music Entertainment). These games used a special guitar controller and pick called the "vPick", and were precursors to products such as Guitar Hero.

In the late 1990s, he was a co-founder of Staccato Systems, and developed the SynthCore sound engine. Staccato Systems was acquired by Analog Devices in 2001, where Jaffe continued as Chief Architect and developed SoundMAX (which has shipped on over 80 million PCs) and VisualAudio, presented at the 2006 Audio Engineering Society Conference in New York.

Since 2006, he has been Senior Scientist/Engineer at Universal Audio, where he developed the DSP system for the UAD-2, Satellite, Apollo and RealTime Rack hardware, used to emulate classic analog hardware and do high resolution audio I/O.

He has been awarded several patents, as well as awards from the Bourges Festival and the International Engineering Consortium.

Writings

Jaffe's writings have been published in Computer Music Journal, Interface, Leonardo Music Journal and Perspectives of New Music, and in the books “The Music Machine,” “The Well-Tempered Object,” and elsewhere. He was the Keynote Speaker at the conference of the Australian Computer Music Association in 1995 and has been an invited speaker at the Aspen Design Conference, the InStat MDR Microprocessor Forum, the USENIX Conference and elsewhere. He has given lectures and papers at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Tokyo, at Conferences of the Audio Engineering Society in New York and San Francisco, and at International Computer Music Conferences at the IRCAM studio in Paris, as well as in Venice, Aarhus (Denmark), Vancouver, Montreal, Banff, Scotland, Rochester, and Columbus.

He has been a frequent Resident Artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has done composing residencies at the Edna Saint Vincent Millay Colony and elsewhere. He has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the US Information Agency, the Goethe Foundation, the Presser Foundation, the Ross McGee Foundation, Meet-the-Composer and others.

Discography

Solo CDs on the Well-Tempered label (available on iTunes, search for 'David A. Jaffe' or via jaffe.com)

Also works on the following compilation CDs:

Also works on the following DVD: