Biography
Michael Klingbeil has maintained an active career in composition, electroacoustic music, computer music research, and software engineering. His composition have been played in both the U.S. and Europe by leading ensembles and performers including the Argento Chamber Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Minnesota Orchestra, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Collide-O-Scope, Fifth House, Stony Brook Contemporary Players, Oberlin CME, Augustus Arnone, Thomas Rosenkranz, Jennifer Beattie, Jacob Greenberg, and Adam Marks. He has participated at festivals including Aspen and Centre Acanthes, and was a fellow at MacDowell in 2008. He was the first prize winner in the 2009 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award Competition. Additional honors and awards have come from the Concours Internationaux de Bourges, Earplay, First Music, the Concorso Internazionale “Luigi Russolo,” and ASCAP.
He completed his studies at Oberlin College and Conservatory, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and Columbia University. Principal teachers and mentors include Tristan Murail, Fred Lerdahl, Brad Garton, Heinrich Taube, Gary Lee Nelson, P.Q. Phan, and James Beauchamp. As a French horn player, he performed in a variety of ensembles both at Oberlin and the University of Illinois, where he studied under Kazimierz Machala. From 2006–2012 he taught composition and electronic music at Yale University as both Lecturer and Assistant Professor (adjunct). He has been involved with computer music and audio technology in both the academic and commercial fields and is the author of SPEAR, a unique and widely-used tool for audio analysis and synthesis. In 2012, he joined Biba Systems, Inc. to help develop audio-video conferencing software. Biba Systems was acquired by Amazon Web Services in 2015 and he has continued at AWS as a Principal Software Development Engineer. He currently resides in Connecticut with his loving and supportive family.
