is the moniker I, Chris Miller, use for my creative musical endeavors.
My creative output includes compositions, quite a few of which are for Javanese gamelan instruments. But owing to my biography, proclivities, and other involvements, I’m at least as interested and active in improvisation and collaboration. Studying, playing, and teaching traditional Javanese music has been especially influential. So has my interaction with Indonesian composers of music typically characterized as experimental or avant-garde—or as the late I Wayan Sadra put it, “bukan biasa” (not ordinary).
Professionally I use Christopher J. Miller as a less fanciful attempt at disambiguation. As an academic—I hold a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and am now a Senior Lecturer in Music at Cornell University—I direct most of my energy and time to teaching and research. My work in both of these areas has led me further afield, geoculturally, socioaesthetically, and intellectually: to the whole of Indonesian music, in my first book, co-edited with Andy McGraw; to my course Music in and of East Asia; and to directing Cornell’s steel band. I’m broadly interested in the response of musics and musicians to various aspects of modernity, as well as the relationship of music to social and cultural hierarchy. Though all of this, Javanese gamelan and musical experimentalism remain strong centers of gravity.