Alex Mincek is a composer, performer, and co-director of the New York-based Wet Ink Ensemble.
His work creates musical contexts in which diverse sound worlds seamlessly coexist—from raw to highly refined timbres, from rhythmic vitality to abrupt stasis, and from mechanical-like repetition to sinuous continuity. His music frequently explores novel approaches to microtonal harmony by integrating methods often regarded as incompatible. Mincek’s musical thinking is also concerned with how physical shape, movement and color can be used as models for organizing musical sound and structure in relation to psychoacoustics and musical perception more generally.
Mincek’s music has been programmed at venues and international festivals including Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Wigmore Hall, IRCAM, Radio France, Strasbourg Musica, Darmstadt (IMD), Ultraschall Berlin, Festival Archipel Geneve, Warsaw Autumn, the Contempuls Festival in Prague, and the Ostrava New Music Days. He has collaborated with ensembles including the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Janacek Philharmonic, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Linea, Dal Niente, Yarn/Wire, Mivos and the JACK Quartet.
Mincek is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Alpert Award, and multiple awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music has also been recognized through commissions and awards from arts institutions such as the French Ministry of Culture, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, ASCAP, Chamber Music America, MATA, Radio France, the Barlow Endowment, Fromm Music Foundation, and the Koussevitsky Foundation.
Mincek received his MA from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Nils Vigeland, and his DMA from Columbia University, where he studied with Tristan Murail, George Lewis and Fred Lerdahl. He is currently a professor of music composition, and the director of the Institute for New Music at Northwestern University.
Glossolalia
Digital Voice
“With [Beckett’s] Not I in mind when composing Glossolalia, Mincek found that this type of performance comes more naturally to electronics than it does to people. To create the electronic voices in Glossolalia, Mincek used the text dictation feature on his Mac. The function of the dictation feature is straightforward, you type in text and it changes it into speech. To get the desired rhythmic consonant sounds, Mincek experimented by feeding the program gibberish. “This feature has such a rigid algorithm that you can really mess it up. As the work is associated with Beckett, nonsense is something that is attractive,” says Mincek. “In the movement Mimesis, Kate is most directly singing material like the computer voices. This reveals what is so special about the computer voices—it’s their lack of any kind of rhetoric. Not only do they not have a body, there’s no they there. It presents the sound in a completely different way.”