F. De SenaFred De Sena

Ferdinando De Sena, Brooklyn-born American composer is currently Director of the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Miami. He teaches composition, music technology, and advanced analysis. Other scholarly interests include musical aesthetics, and the analysis of popular music. Fred De Sena’s music has been performed at international, national, and regional conferences of CMS (the College Music Society), SCI (the Society of Composers, Inc.), ICMC (the International Computer Music Conference), SEAMUS, (the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States), and IDRS (the International Double Reed Society)
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He has also had performances at many other concert and theatrical venues including Recoleta Centro Cultural and Centro de Experimentacion at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the Puerto Rico Conservatory in San Juan, and the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami.

Fred De Sena has earned degrees from Ithaca College (B.A in Computer Science and Music) and from the University of Miami (M.M in Electronic Music and D.M.A. in Composition). His principle teachers were Dennis Kam, (composition), Peter Rothbart and Don Wilson (electronic music),

Upcoming Performances

 

Something About My Aesthetic Values

One of my great concerns in music, for electronic or acoustic instruments, is harmony and harmonic progression. I work very hard to create a harmonic palette and procedures that sound logical, possibly directional, that support formal structure, and yet are fresh, flexible, and compelling.

I see melodic material as flowing from and joining with the harmonic, which, in turn is comprised of combined melodic movement – with constraints (context and voice leading). For this reason there is a tendency for my electroacoustic music to be strongly based on notes and sonorities (and spectral content – which to me is also harmony). This is not, of course, to the total exclusion of form based on timbral or textural-granularity evolution and juxtaposition, but it is a strong emphasis.

Rhythm is another matter. I believe that clarity of metric time provides powerful syncopated and poly-rhythmic possibilities. However, my rhythms are not straight ahead four, or three, or 6/8, but tend to be modulated, offset, and flexible, with snatches of this, and a little of that.
The combination of rhythm and harmony, my harmonic rhythm, is flexible, often offset, sometimes contrapuntal or heterophonic, and, even in homophonic textures, favors little movements in inner voices. Yet my music is not what you might call eclectic in style, their is a fair consistency.

This all makes me something of a conservative maverick for mainstream electroacoustic music, but I believe they can learn some things from Brahms, Beirach, Ornette, Scriabin, Coltrane, Hendrix, Reznor, Schoenberg, Zappa, Shorter, and Reich, et al., as well as Babbitt, Stockhausen, Varese, Berio, Eno, Cage. Xenakis, and Davidovsky.

The instruments, practices, and aesthetics of music, and new media, or combined media are being born now. Research and explorationin of timbre, spatialization, analytical recognition, and interactive control are part of it, but not all of it. There will be coming a congealing or coalescense of practice(s) into new "styles."


 

MP3 Files of Recent Works:


Need a quick twelve-tone matrix?

 


Contact:

fdesena@miami.edu