Album Notes

Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer based in Utah where he is Composer-in-Residence at Brigham Young University. He has degrees from University of Washington, Mills College, and Brigham Young University where his teachers have included Stuart Dempster, John Rahn, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Thea Musgrave, and Meyer Kupferman. He cofounded Seattle Experimental Opera which has produced seven of his operas. He has performed with such musicians as Christian Wolff, Eyvind Kang, Larry Polansky, Daniel Good, Francois Houle, Michael Bisio, Robert Reigle, Gino Robair, and Phil Gelb in a variety of venues and recordings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His scores are published by Frog Peak Music. Asplund is also an active scholar and has published articles and chapters on music theory and critical theory.

Of his music, Stuart Dempster has said, “Asplund, in his well-crafted compositions, delightfully teases us on those slippery slopes between composition and improvisation,” while a jazz reviewer has said Asplund’s music “walks a squiggly line that passes through jazz…, free improv, rock, funk and a whole spectrum of ‘modern classical’ styles, including minimalism, serialism and a handful of other ‘isms’...” Other words used by reviewers to describe his music include: passion, panoramic power, pure pointillist, plaintive, painstaking, rhythmically toothy, rocking, remarkable, rollicking, searing, subdued, soothing, submersive, splendid, unique, enjoyable, ethereal, mesmerizing, mind-blowing, otherworldly, absorbing, intelligent, idiosyncratic, distinctive, captivating, bewitching.