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John LaSala began his career in music in 1992 when he entered SUNY @ Stony Brook. There he studied composition with Prof. Peter Winkler and picked up the basics of electronic & computer music from Dr. Daniel Weymouth. The spring of 1994 saw his first significant composition, “Tales of a Synthetic Winter,” a ten-minute work for flute, recorder, and sequenced electronics. For the remainder of his time there, John and collaborating composer, Chris Torgersen, created a musical theater piece called Dimensional Rift. The production incorporated projected-video technology, simultaneous live and taped music, ensemble choreography, and featured a large, entirely female, all-singing cast. Dimensional Rift was the feature of Stony Brook’s first Annual Spring Arts Festival in April of 1996. In April 1999, macduffie/jones performance commissioned John to score their aerial/dance theater adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. The rest of 1999 was spent completing and workshopping the first incarnation of The Snow Queen, including a forty-five minute abridged version produced twice by SoHo’s HERE as a part of their American Living Room Series. macduffie/jones performance finally produced the show for the first time in its entirety in January 2000 at the Cornelia Connelly Theater in the East Village. In the months following, John continued to polish the music from The Snow Queen, remixing the tracks and adapting the score into a purely auditory experience. On July 24, 2000, The Snow Queen, John’s debut album was released nationally on Lincoln Mayorga’s TownHall Records. In addition to working on the album, Angela Jones and fellow aerialist Chelsea Bacon commissioned John for more new music, this time for an entirely aerial dance work entitled, “Sleeping Beauty Lies.” The piece premiered in March 2000, at the Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater as a part of Jones’ variety show, UnBound. The commission resulted in a wild mesh of electro-acoustic controlled chaos entitled, “Angela Jones's Flying Circus.” In 2001, a second incarnation of The Snow Queen was produced by macduffie/jones performance, this time as a part of the New York International Fringe Festival. After a successful six-show run, John was awarded the festival's Excellence Award for Music Composition. In 2002, John completed work with fellow composer Charles Griffin on an electronic score for the short film, "City Hall." Meanwhile, John's collaboration with Angela Jones has continued to this day with several new compositions in the works and many performances planned for the next year. John is an active member of the New York chapter of the American Composers Forum and wrote an article for their national publication, Sounding Board. He is also sponsored by the Syntrillium Software, creators of Cool Edit Pro digital-audio software. An interview with John has been published on their website. |
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