Chris Brownšs music has evolved within the intersections of many different traditions and styles. Following early training as a classical pianist, he was influenced by studies of Indonesian, Indian, Afro-American, and Cuban musics, and then took off on branches provided by the American Experimentalists in inventing and building a personal electronic instrumentation. At first these were amplified acoustic devices; then he went on to build analog circuits that modified their sounds, and custom-made computer systems that interactively transformed them. More recently, he has extended this fascination with instrument building to the design of computer network systems that interact with acoustic musicians and with other computers and musicians connected over the internet.
Collaboration and improvisation have been primary in the development of his music for various traditional instruments and interactive electronics. He has had commissions for such pieces from the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio and the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, among others. He was a member with percussionist William Winant, saxophonist Larry Ochs, and electronic musician Scot Gresham-Lancaster of the pioneering group "Room", which explored the intersection of composition, improvisation, and electronics. His 1992 composition "Lava", for eight instruments and interactive electronics, is an hour-long, quadraphonic sound environment that virtuosically employs live-sampling to create spatially flowing counterpoints of timbre and rhythm.
As pianist with the Glenn Spearman Double Trio he has performed and recorded music in the free-jazz tradition at venues including the San Francisco and Monterey Jazz Festivals, the DuMaurier and Victoriaville Festivals in Canada, and in Europe. He has performed and recorded with such prominent and varied improvisors as Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, Barry Guy, Ikue Mori, Dave Douglas, and John Zorn. He has also been active as a pianist in performing the music of composers such as James Tenney, Henry Cowell, Christian Wolff, William Brooks, David Rosenboom, Luc Ferrari, and Terry Riley.
Between 1986-98 he was also a member of The Hub, an ensemble of computer musicians developing computer network music which explored the interdependency of multiple computer-music systems. The Hub toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe, released three different CDs, and collaborated with such composers as Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, and Ramon Sender. It also participated in several media projects, including remote-site concerts (distance-musics), a live, video-generated realization of of John Cage's chance-operations score "Variations II", and an interactive poetry/music piece for radio.
Chris Brown's most recent works involve extending the experiences of Network Music into new performance venues. An installation involving networked rhythm-machines spread throughout a large space called "Talking Drum" has been produced in Montreal, San Francisco, and Holland. A new series of concert pieces called "Inventions" have sprouted from the polyrhythm generating software for that piece. He has also worked with programmer/composer Mike Berry in supporting the development of the "Grainwave" live synthesis software for the Macintosh. A project called "Eternal Network Music" used Grainwave instruments to produce simultaneous, collaborative concerts between California, Germany, and the East Coast. A new series of web based network pieces is being composed based on the Supercollider synthesis language.
New works will be composed to support these future musical trends: 1) musicians with computers will play music in ensembles, and their software will interact with both other humans and other computers in performance; 2) electronic media will integrate ever more seemlessly with acoustic instruments by becoming more responsive to their musical signals and languages, creating extensions of human intelligence with networked sonic and visual environments.
Chris Brown also teaches Composition and Electronic Music at Mills College in Oakland, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM).