This workshop explores the history and process of prepared and interior piano compositions—including the benefits and pitfalls of these techniques—and how someone might go about composing music for this “expanded instrument.”
Dr. Karl Schindler is a music educator and composer living in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the Department Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Phoenix College and the Music Program Director. He teaches courses in Composition, Music Theory, Electronic Music, Sound Synthesis, Sound Design, and Music History. While primarily a composer of chamber works and intermedia pieces, Schindler has received numerous commissions for music for theatrical productions in Illinois and Arizona, as well as serving as resident sound designer for the Phoenix College Theatre Program. In addition, he has been the resident music director for Phoenix College’s musical theatre productions since 2011. Schindler’s preferred compositional focus is the exploration of the theatrical side of concert music. To this end, he creates intermedia pieces that incorporate multiple video projections, lighting effects, and a certain level of theatrics from the musicians involved. His first piece in this “multimedia cantata” genre, the enthusiastically received The War Poems, used five slide projectors with hundreds of World War I era photos, synchronized to his musical setting of poems by Siegfried Sassoon. The second large-scale work in this genre was based on texts from Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, entitled Ghost Voices: Songs from a Cemetery. Karl Schindler has won Distinguished Teaching Awards from Phoenix College and Arizona State University.
