Sculpting Time Conversation: Christopher Stark
This spring, the Time Based + Media Art department resumes Sculpting Time, a series of conversations for members of the WashU community, featuring media artists, composers, and researchers who work with and/or investigate time. Curated by artist and sound composer Monika Weiss, professor of art in the Sam Fox School and affiliate professor of performing arts in Arts & Sciences, the series is inspired by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s notion of “sculpting in time” and his book of the same title.
The series welcomes, for the second time into the program, composer Christopher Stark, associate professor of composition at WashU. In this program, Stark and Weiss will discuss relationships between music, sound, and the natural environment, exploring ecology-based practices as part of Weiss’s seminar “Beyond Words, Beyond Images: Representation After History.” A Q&A will follow.
About Christopher Stark
Christopher Stark is a composer of contemporary classical music deeply rooted in the American West. Having spent his formative years in rural western Montana, his music is always seeking to capture the expansive energy of this quintessential American landscape. Stark, whose music The New York Times has called, “fetching and colorful,” has been awarded prizes from the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, and the Barlow Endowment. Named a 2017 “Rising Star” by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, his music has been performed by such ensembles as Alarm Will Sound, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BIT20 Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Momenta Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, No Exit New Music Ensemble, and New Morse Code. In 2012, he was a resident composer at Civitella Ranieri, a fifteenth-century castle in Umbria, Italy, and in June of 2016 he was awarded a residency at Copland House. Recent highlights included performances at the 2023 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2016 NY Phil Biennial. In 2018, he was in residence in Bergen, Norway where he worked with musicians from the Bergen Philharmonic, and in 2020, he was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy as the Aaron Copland Fellow in Music. His score for the feature-length film, “Novitiate,” premiered at Sundance in January of 2017 and was theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics. His debut CD, Seasonal Music, was released in 2019 on Bridge Records, and New Focus Recordings released his hour-long work Fire Ecologies this year.