Vitae

I was born in 1981 in Cleveland OH, to working class parents. My father was an electrical engineer, my mother a secretary. An older prototype millennial in "the cultural turn", I was groomed in various fine arts, fostered by a modernist architect uncle. I always had a facility for drawing, winning competitions & the admiration of my classmates. I also played piano until a teenager, when I discovered electronic music & rebelled. Like many young artists in the late 90s, I was swept up into the electronic music/DJ craze, but by the time I was 19 I was already keen to learn the deeper history of electronic & new music. 

My interests still nebulous around Y2K, I skipped college to study at Arcosanti; An Urban Laboratory. For two years I lived & worked in Paolo Soleri's "school of thought", teaching myself the history of avant-garde music by night. At this time I discovered Maryanne Amacher's Third Ear Music, & La Monte Young's Dream House, naturally appealing to a young mind interested in both music & architecture. Even in my youthful naivete, I already knew that I wanted to pursue the alienated beauty latent in this new music. At this time were my first computer music experiments, at the cutting edge of granular & spectral synthesis, for example the Pulsar Zips, All-Over, & my epic Selected Spectral Works series. Due to my experience with sustainability, I was hired by the new Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in NY in 2004. For the first two years of its existence I managed the smart greenhouse, while, again, worked on music by night. I had already decided to model my art practice on Kafka's — working a dayjob to support free creativity by night. With my childhood friend & collaborator Adam Menzies, I started a music label – MoSo — & amongst other releases, published my first true album Division; Blossom (now deauthorized). By this time I had become totally preoccupied with Amacher's Third Ear music & Young's sine wave compositions, & enrolled at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago to study these art-science hybrids formally.

By this time an older student with clarified interests & lived experience, I was able to take graduate level courses. I discovered a latent interest in conceptual art, which led to philosophy & poetry, which ultimately led to Adorno's Critical Theory. This reawakened a longstanding interest in Nietzsche's philosophy as well, having read The Birth of Tragedy as an adolescent. As one of Chris Cutrone's early students, I learned the deeper art & political history behind the mid-century avant-garde, & started writing my first essays. Initially the goal was to clarify my own artistic practice via the novel Visual & Critical Studies Curriculum — for instance in the Groundwork For A Study of Maryanne Amacher, or On Drone Music — but I soon learned that my essays were valuable in their own right. My VCS thesis was on boredom in the arts. This led to a brief but galvanizing post as the Editor-In-Chief of the short-lived but galvanizing Chicago Art Criticism, as well as being an Associate Editor of The Platypus Review. For this productive final year in Chicago, I operated an apartment gallery — Mvsevm — while writing critiques of the artistic trends of the moment, book reviews, interviews, & essays. I was very early on a critic of 'socially engaged art', writing essays about the split in artistic sensibilities between purely formal art pour l'art, & social artworks, from a Critical Theory perspective, for instance in my influential Trotsky’s Theory of Art.

In 2011 I moved back to NY, this time in Brooklyn. I found that my new media experience, paired with the critique of social art, were of interest to the bourgeoning net art, & what would become "post-internet" art movement. Again I started a short-lived publication — 491 — & wrote many essays, now mostly lost. (Always valuing prolificness, & ever restless to recreate myself, I have not been particularly sentimental about documentation!) We published some of Post-Internet Art's earliest writing, & I became the first real critic of Jon Rafman's work. However, as I was involved in the Platypus Marxist Reading Group, & still an editor for the Platypus Review, this took up most of my time. As such, I co-organized panel discussions, processed interviews, & edited articles. Partly due to this activity, I was hired by SVA to be the Art History Chair's Assistant, helping with the management of daily operations, organizing artist talks, & so forth. I took this job as a trial to see if I wanted to pursue a PhD — I quickly learned that I didn't want to be an academic, but rather a public intellectual & practicing artist. I have remained steadfast in this commitment ever since. 

While in NYC I also wrote — again by night — the contents of what has become a voluminous, 4-part poetry book, The Irreveries. At the time, & retrospectively, my essay writing had become more poetry than art criticism. I made the conscious decision to distill the scattered ideas of my critical writing into philosophical fragments, prose poems, & lyric poetry. Included also in this major work is the earlier conceptual poetry & textual scores.

Having abandoned an academic career, & growing dissatisfied with the inauthentic careerism of the NYC art world, I eloped & moved to St Louis in 2015 ... after a trip to Bali to informally study gamelan. This was to be yet another fresh start. Perhaps I would prematurely retire from art altogether? I honed my carpentry skills, took a coding bootcamp, & tried other things. But ever the nocturne artist, I still wrote by night. Indeed, some of my best music started flourishing. I spent a great deal of time honing my symbolic composition program; after nearly 20 years of struggling with Max/Msp & other algorithmic environments, as well as just-intonation, it finally started clicking & I was able to pursue the Third Ear & Sine Wave music I had abandoned due to technical incompetence years prior. Much of this creative watershed had to do with being socially isolated & so thrust into solitude — which I rediscovered a love & real need for. Much of my aesthetic comportment is introspective, & I have always supported minor, lyrical art as an important aesthetic sensibility that is threatened by bombast & spectacle. By the end of 2016 I had published three new albums on excellent sound art labels, begat a new publication — Caesura, & had my first child. 

Feeling a dire lack of criticism in general, but mostly locally in St Louis, Caesura was an attempt to write proper art criticism, the kind I tried & perhaps failed to do earlier. Short music & exhibition reviews were to be priority, but we quickly became valued for our longer thoughtful essays. Much of my interest at this time was further clarifying the necessity of aesthetic experience in the 21st century, as well as some meta-criticism clarifying why criticism is important. Our roundtable after the 2016 election remains an important document of the era. Around this time I was also hired by The Pulitzer Arts Foundation to assist with the curation of Glenn Ligon's exhibition Blue Black, & the critical research that went into that exhibit was ultimately published in Caesura. Also from this time, & ahead of its time, was my essay on Art In The Age of AI, somewhat followed up by The Art of Gas. In 2020, when Caesura was flooded by a younger generation of artist-critics, I finally started publishing allegories, which I've always thought of as an exemplary form of criticism, such as the splendid Echo & Narcissus, & started teaching courses online, for instance the original Nietzsche's Aesthetics. With the new Caesura, I have also been co-curating one-day multimedia art exhibitions in St Louis with Janet Xmas, each of which features a dream house installation as well as paintings, sculptures, & performances by other regional artists.

All the while I have been extremely prolific as a composer — you guessed it, by night! My interests for the past two years have been synthesizing the outer limits of Third Ear acoustic experimentation with modern beauty. This has, since my earliest days, been what I regard as the holy grail of all music today. To this end I have been trying to follow-up on Amacher's piano composition Petra, & Young's Well-Tuned Piano by writing augmented, just-intoned piano works that explore exciting new interval relations, as well as what composer Michael Harrison has called “the emancipation of the comma”. In 2023 I was awarded a grant to retrofit a piano with smart player piano technology to which I can live-compose from my algorithmic composition system. A longstanding dream of mine, this stunning Meta-Piano — what Midwest Arts Quarterly called "The best artwork by a St Louis artist I've seen" — advances Conlon Nancarrow's player piano studies as well as Young's Well-Tuned Piano. It is also notable for implementing subharmonic rhythmic tunings in the theta frequency range, the brainwave frequencies commonly associated with dream & reverie. 

My goals for the foreseeable future are the construction of a Dream House — my own interpretation & original composition for the form — & the overdue publication of The Irreveries. Looking back over a quarter of a century of prolific creation, I feel the time is right to pursue more ambitious projects, such as the publication of what may be my only book (a la Leaves of Grass), & something equivalent to an artist's chapel. I am also at a point where I don't feel the need to make art for the public at large, but rather for those who are especially interested on a production level — other artists. In other words, I am about to embark on building my own school of thought as an “artist’s artist”. To this end I am collaborating with local artists to found an art school, The Center for Aesthetic Research. I will be teaching my first class — Philosophy of New Music — in 2024. Strange as it might sound, for all my experience, I feel my best work is still ahead of me!

Bio

Bret Schneider is a composer, essayist, & poet. For the first quarter of the 21st century, Schneider has attempted to synthesize the outer limits of third ear music with modern beauty. Via novel formal experiments, his music cultivates dreamspace & reverie. Recent works include live-composing to a just-intoned player piano with subharmonic rhythmic tuning in the theta frequency range. Schneider is also a co-founder of Caesura Magazine.