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Catalog

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Bio

Christian M. Newman (1981- ) is an American composer, pianist, percussionist, visual artist, author, and music educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An autodidactic learner from a young age, he absorbed a myriad of 20th Century popular and traditional musical influences, along with traditional ‘classical’ styles by his early teens. His mature works are in a complex, Neo-expressionist, and experimental style utilizing dense, chromatic progressions, thick layers of contrapuntal lines, and jarring, angular noise and electronic mayhem. His compositions for piano, especially, demonstrate a unique approach as they utilize thick washes of notes, thorny and rapid passage work between the hands, and dense attacks within parts to emphasize specific resonance possibilities from within the instrument.

His arrangements reflect this stylistic tendency towards immense complexity, along with highly chromatic and symmetrical harmonic content with flowing, and evolving rhythmical progressions. Visually, his works emphasize a striking use of color effects, to varying degrees of complexity, and within a broad range of styles of dramatic landscapes, impressionistic scenes, iconographic character designs, and intricate pointalistic expressionist concepts. His visually compelling full-color graphic scores represent a synthesis and extension of these numerous forms of composition and construction.

Early Life

Newman’s early life is a puzzle as there are few records, and somewhat intermittent ones when they do exist. He was home schooled from preschool through eighth or ninth grade, learning numerous instruments from age 5, including keyboard, percussion, and stringed instruments in numerous musical styles of rock and pop. A noted player by ear, he “noodled around” with guitars and keys out of “boredom” for many hours of his early teens, playing along to random radio songs, and absorbing aspects of performance and form. But his most notable talent was for playing the drum kit, which he seemed to instinctively understand. His parents in particular were struck by his immediate grasp of playing when he first sat at a kit. He would absorb complex styles as a self-taught percussionist and achieve notable skill as an extreme drummer in his late teens. Introduced to Beethoven as a preteen, he would return to classical studies more than a decade later, following an extensive trek through goth-punk, new wave, and electronica styles as a teen and young adult.

In the Wilderness

An early teenage Newman disappeared completely from the public record for several years in 1995, reappearing as a line cook, age 18, in 1999, then completing a GED and enrolling in college at 24, circa 2004. His circumstances are unclear between these formative years, with much wild speculation and elaborate stories related by his familiars. Most relate strange tales of apocalyptic, desert noise punk practice sessions, hippy ufo-descendent/shadow people death cults and other Southern, New Mexico bats### lore. Some of this seems unlikely as Newman and some cohorts developed high levels of skill during said period, and began careers in performance, etc. so we’re taking all this with a grain of salt. Still, Nuevo Mexico is a bizarre place full of strangers, so who knows? He did live in La Joya, Belen, and Los Lunas s during the specified time frames, but rarely as an official listed tenant.

Early Adulthood – Career & Education

Newman eventually returned to Albuquerque, where he became a founding member, and/or performer with several noteworthy bands from the 2000’s, including the new-wave/heavy-rock outfit, Unit 7 Drain: goth-synth rockers, I is for Ida: psychedelic grungers, Shoulder Voices: prog-thrash rockers, The World on Fyre: alt-country gentle rockers, The Grave of Nobody’s Darling, and a host of electronic solo projects, remixes and other musical offerings. He maintained some consistent associations with many of the same musicians from his youth. Following this early career as a rock drummer, his interest in composition led him to rather abruptly begin the process of learning the piano, and then pursue formal training in his early 20s. Soon after, he entered into the undergraduate music program at the University of New Mexico.

During his student career, he completed a Bachelor’s degree in piano performance, and two Master’s degrees in piano performance and theory & composition with Falko Steinbach, Peter Gilbert, Karola Obermüller, Jose Luis Hurtado, and Richard Hermann. He also attended numerous international master courses including the “Musik Aktiv”, “Lebendige Musikerziehung”, and “Fit for Music” courses (Nienbourg in Heek, Germany), and Internationales Klavierfestival Lindlar (Lindlar, Durscheid, Köln, and Kürten, Germany) where he earned certificates in piano performance, physiology of music performance, and advanced piano technique and pedagogy based on works by Peter Feuchtwanger, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Falko Steinbach.

Teaching

As an educator, Newman has taught courses, seminars, and workshops in music theory, musicianship, music history, music for dancers, composition, and piano performance from elementary to the college level at institutions like the Albuquerque Institute of Music’s Trinity College Theory Program, The University of New Mexico, and Klavierfestival Lindlar, Germany since ca. 2011. He has produced multiple complete course manuals currently in use for UNM core theory courses, along with methods for distance learning for musicianship. His full textbook, Music Essentials from the Western Classical Tradition: Middle Ages to the Present (2024), is available through Cognella Academic Publications in Spring of 2025. Representing a culmination of a decade of intensive writing, this work incorporates multimedia elements, embedded listening, and other digitally enhanced, interactive features to create a contemporary, multimodal path through a vast history of Western Classical Music. He is currently a term teacher (senior adjunct) faculty member at the University of New Mexico Department of Music, and Department of Theatre & Dance where he is premiering the preliminary version of this and other scholarly teaching materials.

Composition & Performance

Newman’s first composition, co-written with a friend, Harry Brown, was composed in the this town, La Joya, NM, in an antique adobe horse stable that was set up as a secret cannabis grow room in the Fall of 1994. This experimental noise piece was created on a four-track Tascam tape recorder and was created from samples of an audio lecture on the topic of venereal disease and pregnancy, and a mic’ed electric guitar strummed very quietly by Brown. Newman provided a quiet percussion and audio manipulation of the tape. This initial foray into the Avant Garde would strongly influence Newman to explore further aspects of noise and experimentalism, but also to embrace aspects of popular and classical musical tendencies.

His mature compositions include works for woodwind quintet, wind symphony, electronics, percussion ensemble, chamber pieces for brass duo, mixed ensembles, and piano solo. The majority of his pieces involve dense, thickly woven masses of sound, and ornate counterpoint bound within complex, symmetrical, set-class based, harmonic progressions. His works and live performances evoke a sense of frantic, “hyperkinetic rhythm” (Abq Weekly Alibi, 2004, 2008), and vary from “light and detailed virtuosity” (Bergische Landeszeitung 2013), to a unique “depth and warmth” in slower works (Oberberg-Aktuel 2015).

Of some note in his early studies, he performed the world premiere from memory the complete volume, “Moving” – 17 Etudes for Young Pianists by Falko Steinbach, a notoriously skilled, virtuosic, and harmonically-advanced composer for the piano at the international piano master course, Lebendige Musikherzieung, in Nienborg-Heek Kreisborgen, Germany, 2009. Soon he began to premiere small works for the piano alongside major works from the canon by Chopin, and to give premieres by his colleagues, including composers like Lauren V. Coons, et. al. Some performances of his pieces, including numerous commissioned works, have been given by The Low Frequency Trio (Mexico), Emanuelle Arciuli (Italy), New Music New Mexico (US), Fernando Cardoso (Brazil), Anna Mall (US), The Alma Chamber Ensemble (Brazil), and Jonathan Warburton (UK) at numerous festivals including the John Donald Robb Composer Symposium (Albuquerque, NM), Wolf Tones Electronic Music Festival (Abq, NM), Titwrench Stockholm (Stockholm, Sweden), Klavierfestival Lindlar (Köln, Germany), and Sommerkonzerte, St. Marien Kürten (Kürten, Germany).