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March 20, 2002 between sets, outside Chama, NYC. Photo by Grace Period. 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, Chez Bushwick, 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, Pianos (NYC), 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). 20110319 |
