Michael Edward Edgerton

In works such as adjusting to beams falling and his String Quartet #1, he attempts to convey an expression similar to Edward Said’s notion of an artwork exhibiting "intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction" in order to provide an "occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure and leave the audience more perplexed than before... to explore...a nonharmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, going ‘against’..."

Linkage. Other composers who have worked with desynchronized &/or multidimensional methods include Richard Barrett, Aaron Cassidy, Frank Cox, Julio Estrada, Brian Ferneyhough, Klaus K. Hübler, among others. Edgerton’s work is sometimes associated with New Complexity in Music.

Voice composition: Edgerton has written numerous compositions involving normal and extra-normal voice. Since the mid-90s his voice compositions have focused on searching for the bio-acoustic limits of vocal sound production that involve: 1) nonlinear phenomena; 2) simultaneous sound sources in the vocal tract; 3) multidimensionalty of vocal sound production. Additionally, Edgerton has incorporated sound production procedures seen in ethnic musical traditions from Tuva, Tibet, South Africa, Korea and India, to name a few. Representative compositions featuring the extra-normal voice include: #82 Cataphora, #77 A Marriage of Shadows, #68 prana, #62 Anaphora, #54 Friedrich’s Comma, #45 Taffy Twisters, among others.

Voice pedagogue: Edgerton is a teacher of voice, focusing on methods of extra-normal voice production that extend western avant-garde (anti)traditions, which are influenced from nonwestern music and informed by voice science. Edgerton’s methods are, in the first instance, based upon the healthy voice (i.e. bel canto) that attempt to explore the biodiversity of sound production, in order to expand the limits of the voice – particularly those involving nonlinear phenomena. Edgerton gives individual lessons as well as workshops. His pedagogical activities includes writings designed to spread the idea of systematic processes in voice exploration, these include a book (The 21st Century Voice), two forthcoming book chapters - one in The Oxford Handbook of Singing (Oxford University Press) and the other in Teaching Singing in the 21st Century(Springer Publishing), and two collections of pedagogical compositions, each focused on a separate aspect of the extra-normal voice (Conners Publications).

Voice Research: In 1995 Edgerton was asked by Barney Childs and Phillip Rehfeldt, then editors of the New Instrumentation Series at the University of California Press to contribute a book discussing extended vocal techniques. As a result, Edgerton applied for and received a 3-year Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Center for Voice and Speech (1996 to 1999) to conduct research for this project. Under the supervision of Diane Bless, Michael began the formal study of voice science which has led to the publication of articles and his book, The 21st Century Voice, as part of the New Instrumentation Series – now with Scarecrow Press, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Since mid-1990 Edgerton has been pioneering the compositional use of scaled & desynchronized multidimensional networks in order to unlock nonlinear phenomenon inherent in mechanical

Michael Edward Edgerton (born October 31, 1961 in Racine, Wisconsin) is an American composer and Associate Professor of music composition & theory at the Guangxi Arts University. He received his D.M.A. in music composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana (1994); the M.M. from Michigan State University (1987) and the B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Parkside (1984). From 1996 to 1999, Michael was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Center for Voice and Speech, based at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He has studied composition with William Brooks, Morgan Powell, Jere Hutcheson and August Wegner.

Michael Edward Edgerton. The 21st Century Voice: Contemporary and Traditional Extra-Normal Voice. The text features a comprehensive discussion of extra-complex methods of vocal sound production, within an acoustic and physiologic framework. Most importantly the text and associated recordings propose methods for continued creative exploration. The book has received exceptional reviews and is now available from Scarecrow Press. Due to the comprehensive treatment of extra-complex vocal production within a scientific framework, the book has a broad appeal that extends beyond musical composition and performance to include voice science, acoustics, linguistics, computer modeling and more.