By Mike Wall

 

I am a composer, performing musician and faculty in The Department of Dance at The University of Utah. My family and I moved out to Utah 3 years ago and really love it out here. I was born in Mississippi and grew up in New Jersey, attending Rutgers University to study piano. At Rutgers, I first learned how to play for ballet and modern dance technique classes. I was inspired by the live collaboration with dance everyday and the rapid improvisational nature of accompanying dance. This process awakened a desire to compose and began to exercise that part of my artistic brain. Playing 3-5 dance classes, 7 days a week, is like going to the gym for a composer. Instead of brooding and reflecting for long periods of time about a musical idea, dance class allows you to go with instinct and immediately share that thought with a group of other artists and see how it plays.

I moved to NYC after college and began working for The American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival and for dance studios all over the city. This time period was full of new compositional work. The more I played class, the more work came my way as a composer. It was important to play for as many different teachers and styles of class as I could. The more experience I had with playing class, the more I was ready when a collaboration with a choreographer came my way. I wrote for hundreds of dances and played for thousands of dance classes over the next few years. As I met more and more musicians on the same path as myself, I started noticing a lack of distribution from our small community of composers. Here were some of the most prolific composers and improvisers and yet only a few of them had systems of distribution for their work.

I created, along with a good friend of mine, a website (asimplesound.com) that had 40 musicians for dance and over 3,000 tracks of our original music. It took years and a ton of resources to build this website for the dance community. Although it was praised and well used by the community, it became too much for one person to run alone. I began writing less music and was overwhelmed with the logistical demands of the website. Before moving to Utah, I decided to take a step back from the project and evaluate the benefit for myself and the dance community. I decided to completely redesign the concept of music for dance distribution and focus on the things I loved most about it. 

From what I learned from that experience, I started working on a new project, soundFORMovement.com. This website contains all of my music, over 400 tracks, and is different in one very key way. All of the music is available to everyone in the dance community for whatever price he/she likes, including absolutely free. At the core of the project, soundFORMovement serves dance students and educators, along with new choreographers, all who need all of the support they can get to learn how to start making work. Because of the ease and low cost of digital distribution, I found I could provide this support musically at a very low cost to myself and with huge benefit to the larger dance community. I also stopped requiring fees and licensing for all students and most beginning professionals, a practice that has really limited young dance makers the ability to work with original music for their work. The website is growing very rapidly, and I am so excited to keep developing it. You can contact me through soundFORMovement.com for any further information about my work and for any compositional/editing requests.  

 

 

Related links:

The Playlist Project: For PreK-12 Teaching Artists

Salt Dance Fest 2016: Roster of Teaching Artists

Spotlight on MFA Programs: University of Utah

A Modern Dancer's Guide to….Salt Lake City

 

 

——————————————–