Biographies
Basic, 50 words
Chris Miller is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, where he teaches gamelan, steel band, and courses on music in and of Indonesia and East Asia. Alongside his research on contemporary art music in Indonesia, he is active as a composer, performer, and improviser.
Creativity focused, 182 words
Christopher J. Miller is a Senior Lecturer in the music department, where he directs the gamelan ensemble and steel band, and teaches courses on the musics of Indonesia and East Asia. He started his academic career as a composition major, studying first at the University of Victoria, and then at Simon Fraser University. There he encountered both traditional Javanese gamelan and the innovative work of Indonesian composers such as AL Suwardi, Pande Made Sukerta, and I Wayan Sadra, which had a more decisive impact on his path. The structural features of these musics, and the social conditions in which they are created and performed brought him back to a mode of music-making that emphasizes aurality and improvisation, while also leading toward collaboration. After studying with Ron Kuivila at Wesleyan University for his MA, he shifted his focus to ethnomusicology and scholarship, completing a PhD dissertation on contemporary art music in Indonesia. Since coming to Cornell in 2008, he has resumed his creative engagement with music, including various projects with the improvising ensemble CAGE, and a composition to accompany choreography by Jumay Chu.
Scholarship focused, 130 words
Christopher J. Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Cornell University, where he directs the gamelan ensemble. His primary focus as a researcher is Indonesian musik kontemporer, the subject of his dissertation (for the PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University) and several publications, including a chapter in the book Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music (Cornell University Press, 2022) which he co-edited with Andrew McGraw, and an article in a special issue of Twentieth-Century Music on global musical modernisms (2023) which he co-edited with Gavin S. K. Lee. This scholarly work grew out of his engagement with gamelan as a performer and composer, which has included collaborations with leading figures from Indonesia, among them AL Suwardi, Pande Made Sukerta, I Wayan Sadra, Michael Asmara, and Peni Candra Rini.
See also my faculty profile page.