born August 15, 1969, San Francisco

Québecois-Californian composer and sound artist Éric Marty is active in Canada, the US, France and Germany. His composition prizes include the ALEA III International Composition Prize (2004), the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts (1998), the Prix Jeunesses Musicales du Canada (CBC National Competition for Young Composers, 1997), an ASCAP Morton Gould Award (1997), and a first prize in the SOCAN Young Composers Competition (1994).

He has held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2006-2007), and at the Fondation Camargo in Cassis, France (2001). Many of his compositions and installations have received the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. He has composed for award-winning ensembles, including Ensemble Musicatreize (France), Trio Voltaire (Canada) and the San Francisco Boys Chorus (USA). He has created site-specific audio installations for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2003), Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) in Athens, Georgia (2005), the 2006 International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) conference in Oxford, Ohio, the 2005 ISCM in Zagreb, and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2006-7).

Reviewers have called Marty’s music surrealistic, exotic, quirky, and deliciously unstable. Influenced by surrealist philosophy, his music and installations are also heavily informed by interests in cognitive sciences and natural systems. Many of his instrumental compositions and installations are sound environments seemingly populated by living organisms with distinct characters that belie their instrumental or concrete origins. His recent installation work incorporates real-time video that intersects many of the same interests.

After studying composition with Michel Longtin at the University of Montreal, he went on to study composition with Bengt Hambraeus and computer music with Bruce Pennycook at McGill University. He later received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied composition with Jorge Liderman and computer music with David Wessel and Edmund Campion.

Marty teaches sound art and interactive installation in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in the southern US. He also teaches music theory in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the same university. He previously taught acoustics at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and musicianship at the University of California at Berkeley.

He is a member of Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), an interdisciplinary centre for advanced research in the arts at the University of Georgia. Marty is recorded on the CRS label.

updated Oct 2006