David A. Jaffe

This article is about the composer of contemporary classical and computer music. For the video game designer, see David Jaffe.

David Aaron Jaffe (born April 29, 1955) is an American electronic music composer. He has composed more than 90 works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and electronics. He composed the computer music piece, Silicon Valley Breakdown, and he has published research on physical modeling of plucked and bowed strings. He worked with Julius O. Smith to develop the Music Kit for NeXT Computers.

Biography

Jaffe attended Ithaca College where he studied violin performance and music composition and completed his composition studies with Karel Husa.^[1] He then attended Bennington College and studied composition, orchestration, and counterpoint with Henry Brant,^[2] and electronic music with Joel Chadabe. He received his B.A. in music and mathematics in 1979.

Jaffe received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stanford in 1984, where he was part of the computer music group at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and later the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In addition to his musical work, he researched physical modeling^[3] and ensemble timing.

Composing career

Jaffe has taught composition at Stanford, University of California, San Diego State University, Princeton University, and Melbourne University, where he was a MacGeorge Fellow. His music has been performed by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Chanticleer,^[4] and Earplay,^[5] as well as various choruses, string quartets, and other chamber ensembles.

Jaffe's music has been performed at international music festivals, including:

• The Berlin Festival
• The Bergenfest
• The ISCM Warsaw Autumn Festival
• The Venice Biennale
• The Bourges Festival
• The American Festival in London
• The Music in the Americas festival in Buenos Aires
• The Spring in Havana Festival

His works have been broadcast internationally on the WGBH radio program, "Art of the States." Jaffe has received commissions from ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, the Russian National Orchestra,^[6] American Guild of Organists, the Lafayette String Quartet, and Chanticleer, for whom he was the N.E.A. Composer-in-Residence in 1990. He also received N.E.A. Composer Fellowships in 1982 and 1991, as well as a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2001. His music is published by Schott Music, Plucked String Editions, and Terra Non-Firma Press (BMI).

Musical approach

Jaffe's musical approach is influenced by the American experimentalism of composers such as Henry Brant (a close friend and mentor),^[7] Carl Ruggles, and Charles Ives. His work draws upon a range of sources, including world music, jazz, and historical Western concert styles.^[8] He has been recognized for a "maximalist" approach to composition.^[9]

Many of Jaffe's works incorporate extra-musical elements and political issues, such as “No Trumpets, No Drums,” based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.^[10]

Several of Jaffe's pieces focus on the Afro-Cuban musical tradition, including "Underground Economy," for Cuban jazz pianist Hilario Duran^[11] with violin and interactive electronics, and “Bull’s Eye,” for violin, cello, and Afro-Cuban percussion.

Jaffe is a mandolinist and violinist and has performed diverse styles such as Afro-Cuban charanga, bluegrass, and klezmer, as well as his original styles. He has collaborated with bluegrass musicians including Mike Marshall, Tony Trischka, and Vassar Clements.^{[citation needed]}

Development of Silicon Valley Breakdown

In 1981, Jaffe received a commission from guitarist David Starobin to write a work for eight guitars, voice, and tape. Upon returning to Stanford in the fall of 1981, he began work on the piece, hoping to use FM synthesis as a way to simulate plucked strings. While discussing the project with violist Alex Strong, Strong shared a new technique he had discovered. Returning to CCRMA, Jaffe and Smith began working with it and developed improvements to solve problems of tuning, dynamics, and expression.^[12]

After the premiere of “May All Your Children Be Acrobats,” which combined the new technique and the FM synthesis-based method, Jaffe created a work for four-channel tape alone, in which he further developed the plucked string synthesis technique. The resulting piece, Silicon Valley Breakdown, premiered at the Venice Biennale in 1983 and was performed in 28 countries.^{[13][14][15][16][17]}

At the same time, he and Smith presented a paper on the technique at the 1983 International Computer Music Conference. This paper was then published back-to-back with the Karplus/Strong paper in the Computer Music Journal.^[18] The paper was also included in The Music Machine, published by MIT Press.

Silicon Valley Breakdown also included innovations in simulated ensemble synchronization and the development of the Time Map.^[19][20] This work is described in the article "Ensemble Aspects of Computer Music," published in Computer Music Journal.

The finale from the piece was included in The Digital Domain, one of the first compact discs ever made to showcase the new CD technology. It was released by Elektra/Asylum in 1983. The work has also been released on CDs, including XXIst Century Mandolin^[21] and Dinosaur Music.

The Radiodrum and The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Since 1990, Jaffe has written extensively for an electronic controller called the Radiodrum, developed by Bob Boie and Max Mathews as a three-dimensional mouse at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Jaffe has used the Radiodrum in such works as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle praised for the "resourceful intricacy and variety of Jaffe's writing."^[22] These works were developed in close collaboration with percussionist/composer Andrew Schloss. Jaffe and Schloss describe their approach in several articles, including The Computer-Extended Ensemble, published in Computer Music Journal in 1994.^[23]

In Racing Against Time, for Radiodrum-controlled electronics, two saxophones, two violins, and a piano, Jaffe used the SynthCore sound engine to synthesize physical models of electric guitar, jet fly-by, and car engine effects. The system was designed at Staccato Systems, Inc., which was later branded as SoundMax after the acquisition of Staccato Systems by Analog Devices, Inc.

More of Jaffe's ventures with Schloss include their duo Wildlife, with Jeffe on the Zeta violin and Schloss on the Radiodrum, and Underground Economy, an Afro-Cuban improvisational work using the Radiodrum.^[24]

Jaffe has also worked with the Radio Baton,created by computer music pioneer Max Mathews, a close relative of the Radiodrum. It features in such works as Terra Non Firma, for four cellos and Radio Baton-conducted electronics, released on the CDs "Music for Radio Drum and Radio Baton" (Centaur Records) and "Music for Instruments and Electronics by David A. Jaffe" (Well-Tempered Productions).

Most recently, he collaborated with Seattle sound artist/inventor Trimpin to create The Space Between Us, described below.

The Space Between Us, a tribute to Henry Brant

Jaffe first met Trimpin in Seattle through Andrew Schloss, who was commissioning a work from Jaffe (with support from the Canada Arts Council) for Radiodrum-controlled piano and string quartet. However, given the similarity to The Seven Wonders..., Jaffe wanted to transform the project into an exploration of new territory.

After Henry Brant's death, Jaffe inherited Brant's percussion instruments (18 chimes, a xylophone, and a glockenspiel). He traveled to Santa Barbara to visit Brant's widow and pack up the instruments for further shipping. He learned that Trimpin had also inherited some of Brant's instruments (Trimpin and Brant had been planning a collaboration that never came to fruition). Jaffe approached Trimpin with a proposal to transform the Brant instruments into robotic devices. The piece took its final form when Charles Amirkhanian and Other Minds joined the commission consortium, along with a grant from the James Irvine Foundation. The instrumentation was augmented to include a second string quartet.

In The Space Between Us, the chimes are hung from the ceiling above the audience, the xylophone is split in two and placed at the extreme left and right of the stage, and the glockenspiel and a Disklavier piano are on stage. All of the percussion and piano are controlled by the Radiodrum and the strings are positioned in the aisles surrounding the audience, with two cellos in the extreme rear of the hall, followed (rear-to-front) by violas, violins II, and violins I. The work was premiered on March 4, 2011, at the 2011 Other Minds Festival in San Francisco. In his program notes, Jaffe wrote that the piece "explores what can be communicated and what must remain unsaid as eight isolated string players embedded in the audience, and one percussionist alone on stage, reach out to one another."^[25] The work was subsequently performed at Open Space in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (2013) and on the Wayward Music Series at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle (2016).^[26] The latter was supported by a grant from New Music USA,^[27] the Nonsequitur.^[28]

Music and audio software

From 1988 to 1991, Jaffe worked at Steve Jobs' start-up company NeXT, developing music software for the NeXT Computer. As the first computer to ship with a DSP capable of real-time sound synthesis, Jaffe and Julius Smith collaborated to create a programmable environment called the Music Kit, which fused elements of Music 5 and MIDI in an object-oriented environment.^[29]

In the mid-1990s, he developed the sound for games such as Welcome to West Feedback and Quest for Fame, collaborating with bands such as Aerosmith for the Boston-based company Ahead (later Virtual Music Entertainment). These games used a custom guitar controller and pick called the vPick,^[30] and were precursors to products such as Guitar Hero.

In the late 1990s, he co-founded Staccato Systems and developed the SynthCore sound engine. Staccato Systems was acquired by Analog Devices in 2001, where Jaffe continued as Chief Architect and developed SoundMAX (which shipped on over 80 million PCs) and VisualAudio, which was presented at the 2006 Audio Engineering Society Conference in New York.

Since 2006, Jaffe has worked as a Senior Scientist/Engineer at Universal Audio, where he helped develop the DSP systems used in the UAD-2, Satellite, Apollo, and RealTime Rack hardware. These systems are designed to emulate classic analog audio equipment and provide high-resolution audio input and output and are widely used in professional music production and recording.

He has been awarded several patents^[31][32] and awards from the Bourges Festival and the International Engineering Consortium.