Henry Vega | |
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Birth name | Henry Vega |
Born | 1973 (age 43–44) |
Origin | New York City |
Occupation(s) | Composer, musician |
Instruments | computer, Classical guitar |
Henry Vega (born 1973) is an award-winning composer and Electroacoustic musician from New York City, currently living in The Hague, Netherlands. He founded The Spycollective in 2006, a now defunct music, theater and dance group, and is a founding director of Artek Foundation. Vega has been composing and performing internationally since 2001 and is also a founding member of The Electronic Hammer trio with Diego Espinosa and Juan Parra Cancino. He is married to Polish composer Kasia Glowicka.
Vega studied composition at Florida International University between 1993 and 1999 with the composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia and later between 1999 and 2004 he completed a Masters in Music at the University of North Texas studying under electroacoustic musician Jon Nelson. He moved to Europe in 2001, where he studied at the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and received a Master of Music in Sonology. Between 2004 and 2008, he then completed a PhD from Queens University, Belfast at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC).
One of Vega's influences came from working with American composer Earle Brown, who was a modern proponent of the Open Form style of composition and a father of aleatoric music. This inspired Vega to compose pieces with the idea of "blocks of music," where performers had the freedom of interpretation (not improvisation) to play a block repeatedly until cue’d to another block. Vega said, "“This makes an impression of synchronisity between the performers, even though while they are in the block, they are completely unsynchronised."