The introductory track to the 2015 release of The Plenary Art Ensemble's Cathedral Sessions

Jamie Keesecker - Synthesizer
Kenneth Stewart - Production

Kenneth Stewart & Jamie Keesecker - Prelude Descending - The Plenary Art Ensemble

I'm Kenneth Stewart. Please call me Ken. Thanks for reading. I'd say I'm a bit of a ‘renaissance man’. If I'm playing, it usually has strings. If I'm in the role of curator or composer, a background in performance becomes useful in other ways.

In a previous utterance, music assisted by physical interfaces and sound processing played heavily on my work, however once I finished school my desire to stay behind the desk dwindled. I took to acoustic genres. I'd say for a couple of years I became fascinated with the subtle differences between Jazz and Bluegrass, yet the vast differences in the harmony, sets and motifs specifically in Old-Time and New Acoustic show that what you hear is not always what you expect.

Using the instruments I play I seek to explore the roots of the music that happens around me here in Durham, NC.

The scholarly study of composition prepared me by to use the tools of a composer to develop musical ideas far beyond my own. I took to standards as experimental tools for learning how to create works with rich, melodious textures and romantic harmony.

I'd like to think that the time away from school helped me enhance my original obsession with weaving into my work an underpinning of the ambient electronic music and that of the avant-garde. Or my insistence a perversion for unusual sounds and peculiar timbres somehow coalescing into something familiar and hopeful.

While I do musical research that engages concepts of instrument modification and design and his non-compositional creative work of signal processing (linear and digital) and the hacking and modifications of electronic and acoustic musical instruments and their electronic effects, sometimes what's necessary is putting that all away and singing a simple song.

As a quasi-alumnus member of the Slippage Lab formerly at Duke University now at Northwestern, under the directorship of professor Thomas DeFrantz. Most of my time with Slippage was when I was a graduate student at Duke..
Some other things of note: I was one of Gordon Epperson's final cello students. Nancy Green, and protege, Nelvimar Neves and two summer festivals of lessons and masterclasses as a teenager with Brinton Averil Smith and countless lessons via conversation with colleagues. 

My composition mentors, whom shaped my vision for music creation: Daniel Asia, Pierre Jalbert, Durham’s Scott Lindroth and as well as a summer in Berlin with Samuel Adler; ditto on the colleagues.

Ph.D. from Duke University, and additional degrees from Rice University, The University of Arizona and Pima College in Tucson, AZ.
KennethDStewart.com

Kenneth Stewart & Jamie Keesecker - Prelude Descending - The Plenary Art Ensemble

Kenneth D. Stewart