Michael Boyd
Music Theory & Music History

boyd@umbc.edu

Michael Boyd is a composer and scholar who holds graduate degrees from the University of Maryland (DMA, composition) and SUNY Stony Brook (MA, music theory and history). As a composer, Dr. Boyd is interested in (re)integrating performers into the creative process primarily through various types of graph notation that facilitate a rethinking of performance possibilities. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States at national and regional conferences and extensively in the Baltimore-Washington metro area, and include works for traditional instruments, interactive electronics, and multi-disciplinary performers.

As a scholar Dr. Boyd primarily works with recent the music of composers such as Roger Reynolds and Luigi Nono, and popular music analysis and criticism. He helped organize Reynolds's archive at the Library of Congress, and recently presented papers at the Region VII Society for Composers Inc. Conference (2006) and Society for American Music/Music Library Assoc. Joint Conference (2007) that analyzes The Palace (Voicespace IV) and discusses the archive. “The Roger Reynolds Collection at the Library of Congress,” an article that provides an overview of the collection as it relates to Reynolds's composition process, will appear in Notes next year. Dr. Boyd has also published reviews in Computer Music Journal and Popular Music and Society, and his essay “Perception/Form: Thomas DeLio's Though for solo piano” will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book from the Edwin Mellen Press Thomas DeLio: Composer and Scholar (ed. T. Licata).

Dr. Boyd periodically performs with The Bay Players, a collective of experimental composers, performers, and scholars dedicated to boundary-pushing music created during the second half of the twentieth-century and beyond. In this ensemble, he plays trombone, electric bass, computer, and found objects.