Michael Zbyszynski

Michael Ferriell Zbyszyński is a composer, sound artist, performer, and teacher in the field of contemporary electroacoustic music. Currently, he is the Director of Electronic Music at San Francisco State University, contributes to Make Magazine, and plays with Respectable Citizen.

Dr. Zbyszyński plays flute, saxophones, clarinet, Yamaha WX-7 (MIDI wind controller), and things made from coffee cans and PVC. His 2006 piece News Cycle #2, created in collaboration with video artist Anthony Discenza, was jointly commissioned by the Getty Center and the Montalvo Arts Center, where they were in residence in 2008. In 2004, Zbyszyński finished a  permanent sound installation at Edgemar in Santa Monica, CA, in collaboration with Hugh Livingston. He has appeared, collaborated, or worked with Roscoe Mitchell, Myra Melford, Frank Gratkowski, HPX Multimedia, the Capacitor Performance Group, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (the American premier of John Cage´s Ocean 1-95), Frances-Marie Uitti, and David Wessel, as a soloist with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Composers Inc., UC Berkeley Symphony, Cultural Labyrinth, Berkeley New Music Project, and Common Sense Composer´s Collective, and at the Other Minds Festival, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Montréal Jazz Festival, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Cal Arts, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, University of Washington, Reed College,Portland State University, and The Western Front Lodge (Vancouver). He has recorded and mixed sound for diverse artists, including Debashish Bhattachaya, Amelia Cuni, Fred Frith, DJ Spooky, and Bertram Turetzky. He can be heard on the ARTSHIP Record Label and is included in the Rhizome Artbase.

Dr. Zbyszyński teaches workshops on interactivity programming and sensor design in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has consulted on performances by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. He has taught composition at Berklee College of Music and Northeasten University, and was a Faculty Fellow in Music Technology at the University of California, Irvine. In fall 2000, Dr. Zbyszyński earned his Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley, having earned his M.A. in 1996. His doctoral dissertation, Labirynt for saxophone and orchestra, draws on minimalist, spectral, and sonorist musical styles; his primary advisor was Jorge Liderman. In 1998 he was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study at the Akademia Muzyczna w Krakówie, Poland with Zbigniew Bujarski. While in Poland, he composed the string orchestra piece Beneath a Liquid Paper Sky, which was premiered by the Penderecki Festival Orchestra, under the baton of Pawel Przytocki, at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw. This concert was part of the 40^th anniversary celebration of the Polish-American Fulbright Commission, and subsequently aired on TV Polonia 1. In 1992, he received a B.A. in music from New York University, where he studied composition with Louis Karchin and improvisation with Joe Lovano. He participated in the Composers´ Symposium at the 1996 Oregon Bach Festival (studies with John Harbison and Robert Kyr) and the 1998 Académie d´été at Paris´s Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM: studies with Philippe Manoury, Kaija Saariaho, and

Salvatore Sciarrino).

He sometimes refers to himself in the third person.