Ted Coffey
Education: Ph.D. in composition, Princeton University, M.F.A. in composition, Princeton University; M.F.A. in electronic music and recording media, Mills College; A.B. in music, Dartmouth College.
Research interests: Acoustic, electronic and mixed composition; experimental aesthetics; interactive technologies; installation; sound design; popular music; art & activism.
Ted Coffey makes acoustic and electronic chamber music, multimedia pieces, interactive installations and songs. His work has been sounded in concerts and festivals across the US and Canada, Europe and Asia. Music for dance has been performed regularly in New York City and California at Judson Church, Dixon Place, the Merce Cunningham Studio, the Lab, and many others. Coffey has performed with the Low Tones at Lincoln Center, and with the electric guitar quintet Guitars of Wrath, he gave the live American premiere of Lois V. Vierk's Go Guitars. The Dust Bunny, a collaborative project with animator Grady Klein and composer Paul Lansky was released on the Ellipses Arts label's OHM+ the early gurus of electronic music.
Coffey's composition is oriented toward assemblage, 'openness' and visual paradigms, reflecting study with Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Lansky and others. As radically as possible, musical language, quality of sound and 'sense' are treated as composable parameters. In Open Space, Newton Armstrong described Coffey's music as "subtle, weird and devoid of heroics. It's the kind of music that still resonates for days after you've heard it, and its spaces and gestures continue to form into new and extraordinary geometries."
Coffey serves regularly on publications review and other committees of SEAMUS, ICMA and NIME. His essays and reviews have been published in the SEAMUS Journal and The Open Space Magazine. Writing on the aesthetics and social politics of transmissive networks in art was honored with significant awards from the Josephine De Kármán and Andrew C. Mellon Foundations. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in composition, music technologies, critical theory and pop.