Bill Alves

Bill Alves is a composer, writer, and video artist based in Southern California. He has written extensively for conventional acoustic instruments, non-Western instruments (especially Indonesian gamelan) and electronic media, often integrated with abstract animation. CDs of his audio works include The Terrain of Possibilities (EMF) and Imbal-Imbalan (Spectral Harmonies), and his video works are distributed by the IotaCenter.

He is the author of the book Music of the Peoples of the World, the second edition of which was released by Cengage/Schirmer in Fall 2008. Other writings have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal, SEAMUS Journal, 1/1, and elsewhere. In 1993-94 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellow in Indonesia, where he studied the gamelan orchestra music of Java and Bali. He currently directs the HMC American Gamelan, an ensemble of specially tuned Javanese instruments dedicated to the performance of new, non-traditional music. He is one of the organizers of MicroFest, the annual Southern California festival of new music in alternate tunings. He teaches at Harvey Mudd College of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California.