Earnest Woodall

Last updated
Earnest Woodall
Origin Commack, New York
Flag of New York.svg New York
Flag of the United States.svg  United States
Genres Avant-garde
Electronic
Jazz
20th-century classical music
Minimalism
Occupation(s) guitarist, composer, sound engineer
Years active1988–present
Labels Zephyrwood Music
Website http://www.ewoodall.com/

Earnest Woodall (born July 24, 1959) is an American composer. Born in Bay Shore, New York and raised in suburban Long Island, New York, Woodall took up the guitar at age 10, inspired by rock, blues and jazz players. A local teacher Peter Rogine introduced him to the music of Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams, as well as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk and coming of age with the progressive music of Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Pink Floyd which sparked a lifelong love of both 20th-century classical music, progressive rock and jazz. Earnest Woodall soon attended the Five Towns College of Music and then the Berklee College of Music, later moving into the local music scene of the New York Tri-State area with a wide variety of bandleaders and musicians.

Contents

Establishing himself as a rare artist that can play more than one style of music with true fluency, virtuosity and sincerity. Earnest Woodall proves it on his 2004 Zephyrwood Music release, Time to Think. The album finds him confirming his reputation as an original and innovative composer / performer.

As well as recording his own music Woodall also composed and recorded music for many independent films from 1992–2000 and also has received two Meet the Composer grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Composers Program

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Woodall found himself in the center of the cassette tape underground culture and was reviewed by the most popular underground music zines of the time such as Option , Fact-Sheet Five, Tape Op , Ear , Wired , The Improviser, New Music Journal, See-Hear, and Creative Alternative.

Woodall also pulls a lot of influence from the eclectic randomness of Frank Zappa and the sounds produced by various progressive rock bands such as early Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Yes, and King Crimson.

Reviews

This section is being revised as not to violate any copyright.

Discography

Composition work

Haute Monde1987
Albert's Warning1988
House of Stairs1988
Dirty Water1990
Mad Man of 1st Avenue1991
Three Worlds1992
Abstract Paragraph1995
Legerdemain1997
Ergot Brew1997
Strike, Light, Puff1998
132000
Pictures in Mind2002
Time to Think2004
Sphere Acid Burn2008
Slumber2013
Random Transmutation2015
Pondering2016
Linger2017
Aural Apparitions2018
See Hear2020

Guitar work

AlbumYear
Guitar Works1994
Live @ Benson Hall Cafe2006

See also

Official site

Other sites

Related Research Articles

John Adams (composer) American composer (born 1947)

John Coolidge Adams is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.

Philip Glass American composer

Philip Morris Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped evolve stylistically.

Steve Reich American composer

Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s.

Terry Riley American composer and performing musician

Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his music became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, and delay systems. He produced his best known works in the 1960s: the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 LP A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental, rock, and contemporary electronic music.

Moondog American composer, performer, and instrument maker (1916–1999)

Louis Thomas Hardin, known professionally as Moondog, was an American composer, performing musician, theoretician, poet, and inventor of several musical instruments. Largely self-taught as a composer, his work drew inspiration from jazz, classical, Latin, and Native American music. His music, strongly rhythmic and contrapuntal, later influenced minimalist composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

James Tenney American composer and music theorist

James Tenney was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.

Larry Don Austin was an American composer noted for his electronic and computer music works. He was a co-founder and editor of the avant-garde music periodical Source: Music of the Avant Garde. Austin gained additional international recognition when he realized a completion of Charles Ives's Universe Symphony. Austin served as the president of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) from 1990 to 1994 and served on the board of directors of the ICMA from 1984 to 1988 and from 1990 to 1998.

Bill Bruford English drummer

William Scott Bruford is an English former drummer and percussionist who first gained prominence as a founding member of the progressive rock band Yes. After leaving Yes in 1972, Bruford spent the rest of the 1970s recording and touring with King Crimson (1972–1974) and Roy Harper (1975), and touring with Genesis (1976) and U.K. (1978). In 1978, he formed his own group (Bruford), which was active until 1980.

Steve Howe English guitarist

Stephen James Howe is an English musician, songwriter and producer, best known as the guitarist in the progressive rock band Yes across three stints since 1970. Born in Holloway, North London, Howe developed an interest in the guitar and began to learn the instrument himself at age 12. He embarked on a music career in 1964, first playing in several London-based blues, covers, and psychedelic rock bands for six years, including the Syndicats, Tomorrow, and Bodast.

Minimal music is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.

Ingram Marshall American composer

Ingram Douglass Marshall is an American composer and a former student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick.

Jon Gibson was an American flutist, saxophonist, composer, and visual artist, known as one of the founding members of the Philip Glass Ensemble and as a key player on several seminal minimalist music compositions.

Tom Varner American jazz horn player and composer (born 1957)

Tom Varner is an American jazz horn player and composer.

Alarm Will Sound Musical artist

Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member chamber orchestra that focuses on recordings and performances of contemporary classical music. Its performances have been described as "equal parts exuberance, nonchalance, and virtuosity" by the Financial Times and as "a triumph of ensemble playing" by the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times said that Alarm Will Sound is "one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene."

Scott Johnson is an American composer known for his pioneering use of recorded speech as musical melody, and his distinctive crossing of American vernacular and art music traditions, making extensive use of electric guitar in concert works, and adapting popular music structures for art music genres such as the string quartet. He was the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship, and a 2015 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Arthur "Art" Bixler Murphy was a classical and jazz musician, pianist and composer. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He grew up in Oberlin, OH, where his father was a member of the Oberlin College faculty.

Days Between Stations

Days Between Stations is a partnership between guitarist Sepand Samzadeh and keyboardist Oscar Fuentes Bills. They named the band after the 1985 novel by Steve Erickson. Samzadeh describes the band's sound as "art-rock", while Fuentes describes it as "post-prog".

Michael Nicolella

Michael Nicolella is an American classical guitarist and composer. Described as an iconoclast, he is known for his versatile, adventurous and eclectic approach to repertoire, including the incorporation of electric guitar into his concert programs and recordings. Nicolella's repertoire ranges from the Baroque to the present. His most recent recording is his own arrangement of the complete cello suites of Johann Sebastian Bach; while his past four recordings focused on contemporary music, including his own compositions, alongside those of Toru Takemitsu, Elliott Carter, Luciano Berio, Hans Werner Henze and Steve Reich. He has championed music by such emerging composers as Laurence Crane and Jacob ter Veldhuis and has premiered many works written for him by other composers, including: Joshua Kohl,, David Mesler, Christopher DeLaurenti and John Fitz Rogers, who in 2001 wrote the forty-five-minute piece Transit for Nicolella, scored for electric guitar and computer generated sound. His own compositions include works for solo guitar, chamber music with guitar, a classical guitar concerto, and an electric guitar concerto. His most recent major composition for soprano, guitar and orchestra, The Flame of the Blue Star of Twilight, was premiered by the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and soprano Alexandra Picard in April 2012. He has performed and collaborated with a wide range of groups and artists including: violinist Gil Shaham, rock singer Jon Anderson, best known for his work as lead vocalist in the progressive rock band Yes, broadway legends Bernadette Peters and Brian Stokes Mitchell, the Seattle Guitar Trio, jazz singer Johnaye Kendrick, classical music comedians Igudesman and Joo and is a frequent guest with the Seattle Symphony. Nicolella is a graduate of Yale University, Berklee College of Music and the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. He is currently based in Seattle, where he serves on the music faculty of Cornish College of the Arts. He is married to the painter Ann Gale.

Reed Phase, also called Three Reeds, is an early work by the American minimalist composer Steve Reich. It was written originally in 1966 for soprano saxophone and two soprano saxophones recorded on magnetic tape, titled at that time Saxophone Phase, and was later published in two versions: one for any reed instrument and tape, the other for three reed instruments of exactly the same kind. It was Reich's first attempt at applying his "phasing" technique, which he had previously used in the tape pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), to live performance.