Arnold Dreyblatt

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier (at Wesleyan University) and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. In 1982 Dreyblatt obtained his master's degree in composition from Wesleyan University.He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, he was elected to the Academy of Arts, Berlin.In his installations, performances and media works, Dreyblatt creates complex textual and spatial metaphors for memory which function as a media discourse on recollection and the archive. His installations, public artworks and performances have been exhibited and staged extensively in Europe. "Dreyblatt's project, maintains its edge--and its importance for the rethinking of identity, history, culture, and memory--by refusing to retreat from or transcend [...] public, archival traces." - Jeffrey Wallen, Hampshire College. Among the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt has developed a unique approach to composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. His compositions are based on harmonics, and thus just intonation, played either through a bowing technique he developed for his modified bass, and other modified and conventional instruments which he specially tuned. He originally used a steady pulse provided by the bowing motion on his bass (placing his music in the minimal category), but he eventually added many more instruments and more rhythmic variety. Dreyblatt received a 1998 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. He has also worked with Paul Panhuysen, Pierre Berthet and Ex-Easter Island Head. Dreyblatt's mother, Lucille Wallenrod (1918–1998), was a painter.