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 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.