Bio
A
long time
resident of New Jersey, David
Beardsley is one of the New York area's foremost microtonal guitarists.
Meditative and mesmerizing, his playing is steeped in Indian music and
blues as much as it is the late 20th century minimalist tradition.
Playing microtonal Just Intonation guitar and steel
guitar,
David creates droning ambient soundscapes.
His string quartet "as beautiful as a crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening" was released as an audio only DVD, For Feldman (OgreOgress) July 2006 as part of a tribute to 20th century composer Morton Feldman.
He
started piano
at a young age, but later moved on guitar as a teenager and started composing seriously in his
thirties. Along the way, he developed a strong interest in
the tuning system known as just intonation - tuning by whole number
ratios from the harmonic series. David has studied
North Indian Classical Music
with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Michael Harrison. He has
also attended workshops with Dean Drummond (co-leader of Newband,
director of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium) and David Hykes (Harmonic
Chant aka overtone singing).
Performances
include the American Festival of Microtonal
Music, Chashama, Judson Memorial Church, the Knitting
Factory, Microfest (a Southern California Festival of Microtonal
Music), the Music Annex at
the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Tibet
House, the Trenton Avant Garde Festival and the World Out of Tune
Festival.
Recent
collaborations have
involved dancer Claire Barratt of Cilla_Vee Movement Projects, cellist Loren Dempster, violinist Christina Fong, and dancer Jeremy
Wade. He has been fortunate to participate in performances of Evolution For Electric Guitar And Orchestra by Jon Catler (2002) and The Voice of the Bowed Guitar by Rod Poole (2007).
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