DAVID A. JAFFE's music first attracted international attention in 1982 when his Silicon Valley Breakdown for synthesized plucked strings was featured at the Venice Biennale and acclaimed by Le Monde and Newsweek as a landmark of computer music. This piece has since been performed in over twenty countries and has contributed to his reputation as one of the leading composers working with technology. In addition, his acoustic music for orchestra, chorus, chamberensembles, and solo instruments has been widely performed and commissioned. Recently, he has been pioneering the musical use of the Mathews/Boie Radio Drum, an electronic performance sensor designed at Bell Labs. His latest work for this instrument is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a seventy-minute concerto for Radio Drum-driven acoustic "robot piano" (Yamaha Disklavier) and an ensemble of eight instruments. Jaffe is also well-known for his technical research and software design.

Jaffe's musical language is at once personal and audacious, with aesthetic roots in the music of Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Henry Brant. It embraces heterogeneity and draws on a vast range of musical resourcesfrom folk music to jazz to popular musicto create complex systems of juxtaposition and hybridization, in which several highly-contrasting aspects of experience mix to produce something that is both new and hauntingly-familiar. This "maximalist" approach extends to extra-musical material as well; with elements ranging from birdsong to politics and social justice. Examples include Impossible Animals for chorus and bird-derived synthesized voices, in which a computer creates a hybrid between a wren and a human vocalist; Songs of California for vocal ensemble, based on texts from American labor activists Cesar Chavez, Joe Hill, and others; and No Trumpets, No Drums--spatial negotations for an Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement for pipe organ, trombone and percussion.

Born in 1955 in northern New Jersey, Jaffe began studying violin, mandolin and composition at an early age. After playing in improvising ensembles of various genres in high school, he attended Ithaca College School of Music and Bennington College, and received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from Stanford University in 1983. He has lectured extensively in Europe, Japan, the Americas and Australia, and has taught at Princeton University, the University of California at San Diego, and Stanford University. His music has been recognized repeatedly by the National Endowment for the Arts (United States), with Composer Fellowships in both 1984 and 1989, and a Collaborative Fellowship in 1993. He served as the NEA Composer-in-Residence with the internationally-renowned vocal ensemble Chanticleer in 1991, as well as traveling to Buenos Aires on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, where he presented workshops at the LIPM electronic music studio and concerts featuring the String Quartet of Argentina and the String Quartet of Buenos Aires. In 1995, he was the featured composer at the Bratislava Festival of Electro-acoustic Music in Slovakia. The same year, he served as MacGeorge Fellow in Music Composition at Melbourne University in Australia, and was Keynote Speaker at the Conference of the Australian Computer Music Association. In 1997, he presented a concert in Havana, Cuba, that was featured on national TV, radio and short-wave.

Jaffe's technical innovations date back to the early 1980's, when he developed a breakthrough technique for plucked string synthesis, in collaboration with Alex Strong, Kevin Karplus and Julius Smith (called "Extended Karplus/Strong", and an example of "Physical Modeling with Digital Waveguides".) During the same period, he developed the "Time Map", a theoretical approach to expressive synthetic performance timing. From 1986-91, he and Julius Smith created the innovative NeXT Music Kit software. Since 1991, Jaffe has been pioneering the musical use of the Radio-Drum and Radio-Baton, in collaboration with Andrew Schloss, and combining his interests in physical modeling and software design as part of the Sondius/SynthBuilder project.

As conductor, mandolinist and violinist, he has performed his music at many international forums including the Berlin, Bergen, ISCM Warsaw Autumn, Cabrillo and Bourges Festivals, the American Festival in London and at International Computer Music Conferences in the US, Denmark, Scotland, Canada and Italy. Ensembles that have commissioned works include the Kronos Quartet, the American Guild of Organists, David Starobin's Purchase Guitar Ensemble, the Mostly Modern Orchestra and the Lafayette String Quartet. His music has been performed by such ensembles as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Modern Mandolin Quartet and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. CD recordings of his music have been released on Elektra/Asylum, Wergo, CDCM/Centaur, Vienna Modern Masters and Well-Tempered. His music is published by Schott and Plucked String Editions. His writings on music have been published in Computer Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music, Interface Journal for New Music Research and Leonardo Music Journal; and in the books The Music Machine and The Well-Tempered Object.

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