Ben Leeds Carson

Ben Carson’s work as a composer is supported by a variety of theory and research, including work in both critical gender studies and empirical musicology. His music has been performed at local and international festivals, including Aspen, the 25th-anniversary “June in Buffalo” festival of new music (2000), the Sydney Conservatory’s conference on Music and Social Justice (2005), the New England Conservatory’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (2004), and as a headliner for the 2009 Festival of the International Society of Improvised Music. In 2009, Columbia University’s Music Performance Program presented a concert of eleven chamber works by Carson, with the assistance of the Franklin Furnace Collective and New York’s acclaimed piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. Two new disks of Carson’s work will appear in the 2010-2011 catalogs of Centaur Records and Albany Records. In 2003, Dr. Carson joined the department of music at UC Santa Cruz, as an assistant professor of theory and composition. He teaches in the PhD program in musicology/ethnomusicology, the MFA program in Digital Arts and New Media, and is an affiliate of the Department of American Studies.