Baker Artist Portfolios

daniel grantham currently lives Baltimore, Maryland, where he is active as a performer, composer, and music theorist. His works are informed by an interest in unconventional notation, the harmonic series, guided improvisation, and literature. His compositional process starts with decisions about structure, time, and perception. Working from Barthes, Heidegger, and the music theorist Jonathan Kramer’s work The Time of Music. daniel relies on a balance between group dynamics and individual decisions to create the large mobile and aleatoric forms in his works. This approach often uses images and text asking the performers make decisions and respond to each other as a means of eliminating pure authorial intent. The surface details of his works often reflect his interest in the harmonic series from his studies of the physics of sound and sound synthesis as well as layered rhythmic patterns of unequal length, creating polyrhythmic structures. His works have been premiered in Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York, and internationally. He earned his Master of Music degree from the University of North Texas with an emphasis in music theory after successfully defending a thesis discussing experimental compositional processes in the early music of György Ligeti.