Benjamin Damann is a composer, percussionist, music technologist, & educator from Chicago. His internationally-performed works explore metric & rhythmic complexity, accessibility, habituation, & the timbral manipulation of acoustic instruments through physical preparation & electro-acoustic augmentation. He seeks to normalize such complexities by generating works that engage with them in terms of feel, groove, & intuition.

His research utilizes combinatorics & linear algebra to discover related families of & the interpolation between percussion rudiments, decimal-denominator meters as a facilitation of additive & subtractive operations on complex & nested tuplets, & the pseudo-spectral process of granulating notated music as a means to generate “sporophonic” textures.

As a performer, he enjoys realizing experimental & electro-acoustic works for snare drum & multi-percussion as well as programming software interfaces to aid in the performance of such works. He has commissioned & premiered numerous works via “snippets,” a collaborative project to create new miniatures for percussion. As a member of thenlike?now, he specializes in the performance of contemporary, electro-acoustic chamber repertoire by living composers.

He is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of North Texas & has degrees from Bowling Green State University (MM, 2021) & Eastern Illinois University (BM 2018). Among others, his teachers have included Panayiotis Kokoras, Elainie Lillios, Paul Rennick, Sungji Hong, Dan Piccolo, & Jon Nelson.

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