Christian Asplund

Christian Asplund {[email protected]} is a Canadian-American composer-performer and professor of music at Brigham Young University. His music explores the liminal areas between composition and improvisation, speech and music, content and context, and boundaries and continuities. His writings have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, American Music, Illinois University Press, and University of Washington Press. His scores are published by Frog Peak Music.

The Brick Church Hymnal: Extracts from an Autobiography

Articles/Essays – Volume 48, No. 4

In 1988 I completed my bachelor’s degree in music composition at BYU and moved to New York where I began a graduate program in ethnomusicology. I became disillusioned with the state of classical composition as I knew it at the time and felt that, although I wanted to continue to pursue my lifelong dream of being a composer, I would realize that dream more fully by enriching my musical study with music I had not yet encountered from other cultures. New York had the advantage of an underground jazz scene about which I knew as much as one could learn in those days from hanging out in the imports sections of record stores and reading esoteric music ’zines.