User:Chriscw81/sandbox

Chris Caryl Welch

Chris Caryl Welch (born 12 July 1981) is an American Free Improvisation piano player.

Bio

Chris Caryl Welch is a self taught Free Improvisation piano player. Chris began playing piano in 2001 with no prior musical training and is working on developing a self-stylized method at piano improvisation. Inspiration comes from both Classical music as well as modern Jazz and Blues. In 2010 he released his first self-funded album 2010: Piano Impromptu and is currently working on a second recording in a home studio on a 1920's Knabe & Co 9 ft. concert grand piano purchased in 2011 after being awarded funds from a 2011 KickStarter.com campaign to do so.

Music Concept

Chris Caryl Welch's piano playing concept is based upon on a reoccuring theme in Non-Linear Dynamics and Chaos Theory called "self organization".

"I hope to record novel piano renderings drawn from internalized musical styles including classical, jazz, folk, trance, etc. ... adding to body of work that documents this effort over my lifetime. The idea is I don't want to ever play the same thing twice."

"I wish to record and capture moments of 'stream of consciousness' improvisation, and create novel examples of subliminal self-organization in music that might point to a unifying force that connects the musician's soul to the pulse of the universe itself. A nominal task. Concurrently evoking awareness of a kind of personified effort of the universe to not only self-organize, but become self-aware through the eyes, ears, and antennae of its lifeforms as well. I think it is commonly agreed that somehow music has a hand in shedding light upon this relationship. Also, camouflage colored animals and plant shaped bugs. <from KickStarter Campaign Text">[1]

On a personal note, I like to think of this approach at music like writing an existential diary. It is like communicating the want to communicate, without words. I hope I can create music that can speak to another person and share an underlying awareness of this sort of "springing forth," not just by the execution of my playing, but also by example of the overarching effort to see this come to pass. Through "real-time" trial and error and the observable strides to become truer and better. Chaos Theory is a field of study in applied mathematics with applications in several disciplines including biology, economics, philosophy, physics, meteorology, etc.. This list is growing, and one can imagine it having applications in the study of music (musical acoustics, psychoacoustics, music cognition, sociomusicology, and ethnomusicology). <from KickStarter Campaign Text">[2]

Chaos Theory can be conceived of as a practice of finding higher orders of ‘self-organization’ in the natural world, often borrowing from multiple disciplines and linking disparate networks of information together. It finds relative patterns in dynamical systems that traditionally have been considered chaotic. In such systems, through innovative observation, larger patterns of order can be observed to emerge around what chaos theorists term “attractors."<from KickStarter Campaign Text">[3] "It can be argued that music exhibits a sort of unifying integrity in both the physical and metaphysical worlds. And I believe that "attractors" in music manifest in places where these commonalities converge (i.e. musical theory based upon harmonic acoustics and musical convention influenced by listener appreciation)." <from KickStarter Campaign Text">[4]

Links

ARTIST SITE: www.facebook.com/chriscarylwelchpiano