Dylan Champagne
Lecturer of Music Composition & Digital Audio Workstation
Music 109
Lionel Hampton School of Music
875 Perimeter Drive MS 4015
Moscow, Idaho 83844-4015
M.Mus., Composition, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
B. Mus., Composition, Lionel Hampton School of Music, University of Idaho
Dylan Champagne is a composer, performer, audio engineer, and post-production professional. His music ranges from avant-garde to accessible, from chamber music to prog-punk, and is heavily informed by the 15+ years he spent involved in the underground San Francisco Bay Area music scene. He has been an active member of the Immersion Composition Society since 2001 and has written for film, silent film, chamber groups / mixed ensembles, British brass band, wind ensemble, orchestra, rock trio & quartet, and electronics. Champagne's music has been performed by numerous groups and performers including The Cory Band, The Berkeley Ensemble, The Torch Quartet, and duality.
An avid proponent of music spatialization, Champagne's master's thesis consisted of a research paper titled "Orchestration and Spatialization: Compositional Concepts and Procedures, an Introduction”–which explores conventions of audio spatialization within the non-amplified concert music idiom throughout the ages–and a 20 minute composition, titled “Benthic,” scored for two bassoons, two string quartets, and double bass that explores spatialized gestures, themes, and textures across the ensemble.
A life-long learner and artistic expeditionist, experimentation and innovation are almost always at the heart of Champagne's musical output. In his piece, “Brazen Bull,” for example, the musicians are in a room playing cacophonous, dissonant music while the audio from the performance is transformed in real time into an innocuous and peaceful- sounding texture that is broadcast into a larger room where a casual reception is taking place. Or for Champagne's live score for the 1928 silent film “The Wind”, scored for string quartet and live electronics, he authored a custom MAX/MSP patch that allowed him to create wind-like textures in real time using layers of pre-recorded structured string improvisations to accompany the live quartet.
Champagne recently completed the score and the audio mix for a short film titled Wake which will be premiering at the 2024 Sun Valley Film Festival.
Champagne holds a master’s in music composition from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, a bachelor's in music composition from Lionel Hampton School of Music, and a certificate of audio engineering from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences.