Bio

Day Marvel is a composer, sculptor, installation artist, Max programmer, and improviser on microtonal synthesizers just old enough to be somewhat affordable without the vintage price tag.   She knows how to program her Yamaha DX7iiFD, well enough that the act of programming is familiar and comfortable, like speaking with an old friend.  Her bedroom is filled with guslis from the former USSR satellite countries that do not like to hold a pitch, so she retunes them regularly to an ever-changing list of tuning schemes, sometimes preparing them with Blu-tack for inharmonic resonances.   She has a storage unit filled with disassembled organ pipe sculptures, and one and a half microtonal pianos—similarly, her living room is rendered cluttered with musical sculpture-instruments made from steel and iron.   In her free time, she hunts edible mushrooms, writes poetry, and lifts weights.  She is afraid to spend too much time programming Max, as she could easily fall into a rabbit hole of all-nighters spent patching.   She already dreams about patch cables enough. 

She graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Professional Studies in Music Business from Berklee College of Music, and graduated with a Master of Arts in Music Composition from the University of Iowa. She is currently an ABD PhD candidate in music composition at the University of Minnesota, where she studied with Dr. Sivan Cohen Elias.  She has four years experience as a teaching assistant at public universities teaching Theory I, Theory II, Graduate Theory Review, and Introduction to Digitial Arts (an undergrad course in video and audio art with Scratch, Arduino, Max, and electronics). Her just intonation string quartet has been premiered by JACK Quartet, and her chamber music with electronics work will be premiered by Talea ensemble in May as part of the Twin Cities New Music Festival. She is a member of, and regular presenter at, the “Microtonal University” lecture series run by the American Festival of Microtonal Music (AFMM), and her synthesizer piece “Collective Healing Ritual” has been released in an AFMM compilation of electroacoustic and synthesizer music.