My music builds on Medieval, Renaissance, and modernist traditions, crafting intricate rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and intensity. Many works connect to historical, literary or philosophical ideas; others focus on foundational aspects of performance like complex rhythms, meter, virtuosity, and collective chamber music. Much of my music positions itself in the affects and rhetoric of the 'Classical' in music, such as the multi-movement piano trio Fortuitous Variations, traditional in its form yet also properly modern in its use of extended techniques and aleatoric structures, and also academic in its titular reference to American Pragmatism. Other works mix worlds of concepts, images, poems or narratives, such as The Hunt by Night exploring a Derek Mahon poem and related 15th-century Uccello painting, framing them in the playful savegery of progressive rock.
Amid these varied moods, from the embodiment of viruotisity to the abstraction of philosophy, one finds my committed interest in collaboration, using the territory of collaboration; I frequently collaborate with leading new music performers, especially through my ensemble counter)induction founded in 1998. And at times, this impulse leds to collaborations with artists in other fields, like the embedding my music in arts by Frank Wang Yefeng, and developing AI videos for extant works with Maryam Faridani, both upcoming in 2024. My collaboration with poet Marlanda Dekine, Ars Poetica for speaking poet, violin, guitar and cello, surfaces insights into the nature of being and the power of art.
The most consistent element of my work is a problematizing historicality, the relationship of past to present music. Koselleckian simultaneity manifests through transformative adoption. Sometimes the crossing of historical regimes is jarring, as when Quintet l’homme armé shrieks unexpectedly despite its 15th-century cantus firmus, transformed unrecognizably. Other times it is more overt, like the my study on the ballade Etude on 'Pymalion...' engaging the exquisite foreignness of the past through modern techniques and rhythms.
Reviews & Awards
Regarding his Quintet “l’homme armé”, Allan Kozinn wrote “he couches [the medieval melody] in such thoroughly modern scoring that the ear is lured to other things, including the juxtaposition of eerie string writing with playful material for the clarinet and piano, or the lively interplay among all five instruments.” (The New York Times March 12, 2005.) Regarding A Book of Songs (2006), the Stephen Brookes wrote “[they] can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well written and insightful.” (The Washington Post May 23, 2006) Regarding La Déploration, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that "...the violinist, cellist... and clarinetist... spread out throughout the crypt. Against vaporous harmonics and ghostly fragments of Renaissance music played by the strings, [a] warm, clear clarinet announced itself as very much alive as it sashayed in and out of blues territory and laughed in the face of their mournful keening." (The New York Times May 17, 2015.)
He has been awarded the League of Composers ISCM Composers Award (2005), the Salvatore Martirano Prize (2006), and the Robert Avalon Prize (2010), and a Fromm Commission (2012). He is a MacDowell Fellow in Winter 2017, and an Avaloch Music Farm Fellow in Fall 2017. His music has been performed by counter)induction, Aeolus Quartet, Inscape Chamber Orchestra, Redlight Music, Dan Lippel, Robert Baker, Trio Cavatina, Edge Ensemble/Contemporary Music Forum (DC), pianists Ieva Jokubaviciute (Shenandoah University), Alice Belem (State University of Minas Gerais), and Ning Yu; cellists Elise Pittenger (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and Schuyler Slack (Richmond Symphony) and Lori Barnett (George Washington University); and clarinetists David Jones (Washington National Opera), Benjamin Fingland (Dorian Winds).
He is a founding member, curator, and composer-in-residence of counter)induction, a composer/performer collective active in the New York region (www.counterinduction.com). He has taught masterclasses and presented his own work at the Shenandoah University Conservatory of Music, High Point University, Universidade Estadual de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the Wintergreen Music Festival, and the Central Conservatory of Beijing. Recordings & Publications His works have been published by New Dynamic Records (Deixo | Sonata for viola and piano. counter)induction: Group Theory. 2012), Capstone Records (102nd & Amsterdam for violin, viola, and cello. Journeys. 2006), and the Society of Composers, Inc. (La Guerra de la Drìada. "Journal of Music Scores,” Vol. 36. 2005.) A portrait CD on New Focus Records (“Fortuitous Variations” (Spring, 2018) features performances by counter)induction, Trio Cavatina, and the Aeolus Quartet.
Education and Academic Positions
Douglas Boyce is Associate Professor of Music at the George Washington University. He teaches composition, musicianship, theory, history, philosophy of music. He has had many administrative roles, including Department Chair, Dean's Council, Faculty Senate, Corcoran Vision Working Group (Chair), and convener of a college wide Arts Initiative. He establish the Stanley Yeskel Memorial Concert Series and successfully launched the GW Summer Piano Institute, now the Corcoran Chamber Music Institute. He holds a BA in music and Physics from Williams College (1992), an MM in composition from the University of Oregon (1996), and a PhD in Composition from the University of Pennsylvania (2000). His dissertation piece, Disputatio Inter Manum Calamumque arranges 16 players spatially into three smaller ensembles; this began an interest in the spatial elements of concert performance that has reappeared in La Deploration, Displacements, and Alcyone. His doctoral essay examined the polytextual 13th-century motets of the Montepelier Codex examining relations between text and music, and the refrain as a locus for formal ‘breakage’ in both the music and text. He studied composition with Dr. Robert Suderburg (1990-92), Andrew Jaffe (1990-92), Dr. Kathryn Alexander (1995-96). Dr. Robert Kyr (1993-95), Dr. James Primosch (1999-2000), Dr. Anna Weesner (1998-1999). Dr. George Crumb (1996-1997).
As an individual artist he has received support from the Alan and Margot Blank Foundation, GWU, Chamber Music America, and the Fromm Foundation. His work with counter)induction has received support from the Presser Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts 2005-2014 , the Alice M. Ditson Fund, Amphion Foundation, Argosy Foundation, Cary Fund for New Music 2011, Meet The Composer, Mary Cary Flagler Trust.