TIM FEENEY

Improviser, composer, and interpreter Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the possibilities inherent in unstable sound and duration. Tim began working in this thread in 2002, within Boston’s community of improvisers interested in austere combinations of sounds and silences, and has since performed and recorded with musicians throughout the United States and abroad. He frequently collaborates with artists including the trio Meridian, with percussionists Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart, pianist Annie Lewandowski, cellist and electronic musician Vic Rawlings, vocalist Ken Ueno, saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, banjo and electronic musician Holland Hopson, trumpeter Nate Wooley, sound artists Jed Speare and Ernst Karel, video artist Jane Cassidy, and many others.

He has presented work at experimental spaces throughout the United States, such as the Red Room in Baltimore, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Knitting Factory New York, and The Stone, as well as the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC-Berkeley, the Stanford Art Museum, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College. Within this community, he has recorded for the experimental Caduc, Accidie, Rhizome.s, Full Spectrum, Sedimental, homophoni, Audiobot, Soul on Rice, lildiscs, and Brassland/Talitres labels.

Tim also builds sound installations, concerned primarily with the acoustic properties and geographies of neglected or nontraditional spaces.  His recent work has been presented by festivals at locations including Silo City, the abandoned grain complex along the Buffalo River in western New York, Boston’s Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, the preserved steam pumping station that processed the city’s drinking water, and the Bernheim Research Forest, outside Louisville, Kentucky, as well as by more formal events at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans and the University of Richmond. 

As an interpreter of contemporary compositions, Tim has performed at venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Zankel Hall, the American Academy in Rome, and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and his work has been featured on WNYC Radio’s New Sounds. A member of Boston’s Callithumpian Consort, Tim appeared on the Musica Nova series at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, and at New York’s Tonic, as part of its 50th birthday celebration for John Zorn. As a founding member of So Percussion, Tim appeared in concerts and masterclasses at Columbia University and Williams College, and commissioned David Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature, premiered at the 2001 Bang on a Can Marathon.

He was a co-founder of the duo Non Zero, with saxophonist Brian Sacawa, which performed American and world premieres of works in concerts at MIT, NYU, the University of Michigan, the Kerrytown Concert Hall, New York’s Tenri Cultural Institute, and Eastern Nazarene College. As the percussionist in the onstage band for Rinde Eckert’s chamber opera Orpheus X, Tim performed to great acclaim in stagings at Boston’s American Repertory Theater, the 2008 Hong Kong International Festival for the Arts, and New York’s Duke Theater at 42nd Street, praised by the New York Times. 

Tim is currently faculty in the Instrumental Arts and Performer-Composer specializations at the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches percussion, composition, improvisation, and sound art. He is also a faculty member of the Chosen Vale International Percussion Seminar, a yearly chamber music-intensive workshop bringing students from the US and abroad to rehearse and perform at the Enfield Shaker Museum in New Hampshire. From 2012 to 2018 Tim served as Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Alabama, where he led the applied percussion studio and the Alabama Percussion Ensemble, served as the principal percussionist of the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra, and was a frequent performer with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. From 2007 to 2012 Tim directed the percussion program at Cornell University, where he taught the Cornell Percussion Ensemble, Cornell Steel Band, and CU World Drum and Dance Ensemble.

An active guest educator, Tim has given workshops on improvisation, chamber music and solo percussion performance, Ewe dance-drumming, and Balinese gamelan at schools including the Eastman School of Music, Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Tennessee, the University of Washington, Michigan State University, the University of Miami, the Longy School of Music, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, Bucknell University, and the Peabody Conservatory. He has presented new music and given invited lectures and workshops at the international conventions of the Percussive Arts Society in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017, and is a member of the PAS New Music Research Committee.

Tim earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the Yale School of Music, where his teachers included Robert van Sice, Richard Weiner, and Paul Yancich. In addition, he has studied Balinese gamelan with Andrew McGraw of the University of Richmond, and the late Pak Wayan Konolan in Den Pasar, Bali, and Ewe dance-drumming with James Burns of Binghamton University, Johnson Kemeh of the University of Ghana at Legon, and with master drummer Kodzo Tagborlo of the Dzigbordi dance-drumming society, Dzodze, Volta Region, Ghana.

He is a proud endorser of Pearl/Adams concert instruments, Zildjian cymbals, and Vic Firth sticks and mallets.