biography
Simon Brown is a composer, cellist, sound artist, educator, and activist. He finds musical inspiration in everyday environmental sounds and wields them into artistic expression and social commentary.
He grew up in activist-run squats in New York City’s East Village before his family set up later in rural Massachusetts. These communal environments instilled in him the importance of art as service to society. He views this as one of his compositional and educational guideposts.
His work includes concert music, film scores, sound installations, collaborative video, and novel digital technology. His music emphasizes interpretation of ordinary sounds and audience engagement. Environmental “noise” guides his musical sensibility; music is everywhere and often surreptitiously created.
Brown seeks to harness familiar daily sounds through a means of replication using traditional and non-traditional instruments in a technique called Musical Realism. His string quartet get around, commissioned by the ETHEL quartet, evokes race cars. His orchestral work a bunch of different kinds of water elicits the ethereal qualities of water in motion: rushing rivers, crashing waves, and soft rainfall.
He collaborates with creative technologist Sydney San Martín by co-developing a unique digital technology that allows the artists to send and synchronize particular audio to audience member’s phones that they can then manipulate in tandem with Brown and San Martín during live performance. This sound art composition/engagement technology debuted at the 2023 New Music Gathering in Portland, Oregon in Brown’s piece called studies in turbulence.
Brown seeks to draw in the listener not only through familiar sounds and technology but also in thought-provoking social commentary and engagement. He collaborates with filmmaker Josh Deane in goodcomposer/DEADCOMPOSER, a video and sound art work involving fifty other multidisciplinary artists. This installation, that deconstructs pop culture and commercialism, was first presented during his residency at Arts Letters & Numbers in Averill Park, NY.
Brown’s work has been presented at New Music Gathering, the Brooklyn Public Library, National Sawdust, Close Encounters With Music, and Composers Now.
In addition to his composition work, Brown founded the Young Composers’ Program, an all-ages composition writing initiative, at the Inwood-based Orchestrating Dreams. He served as the conductor of the Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s and helped establish the first youth orchestra run by a social services organization, Kids 4 Harmony.
Brown holds a BA in Music from Westfield State University and an MA in Composition from City University of New York, Brooklyn College. His primary teachers were Andy Bonacci, Morton Subotnick, Douglas Geers, Jason Eckhardt, and Tania León.