From Averill Park to sound art success
When the band director at Averill Park High School discovered that Seth Cluett had the capacity to master new instruments quickly, he put the kid to work. During Cluett’s four years in band, he played flute, bassoon, double bass and electric bass and also baritone horn. Wherever there was a hole in the membership, he filled it.
Cluett’s curiosity, flexibility and musicality have served him well in a career that’s landed him positions at the forefront of music and technology. As a composer, he creates pieces that quietly hover in the borderland between concert music and sound art.
At Columbia University, Cluett, 44, is a member of the music faculty and assistant director of the Computer Music Center. Once known as the Columbia Princeton Center for Electronic Music, the CMC is recognized as a pioneering outpost in the field, starting in 1951 when a newfangled tape recording machine arrived in the music department and some composers started to experiment with it.
“This is the historic center of the universe I grew up in and the music I value. I left a tenure track to come here and be staff,” says Cluett, who subsequent to his arrival also joined the faculty. His immediately prior teaching post was at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., where he worked with both the music and the art departments.
Among Cluett’s duties at Columbia he oversees the vast inventory of computers and synthesizers acquired over the decades. This includes the famed and room-sized RCA Mark II synthesizer that was installed in 1957. Milton Babbitt and Charles Wuorinen were among the composers who used it to fashion masterful new works. “It’s a 1.5 ton carcass in a room right next to my office. Tourist groups come to see it,” says Cluett.
Another current post has Cluett working at an even more consequential laboratory not just for music but for media in general. The Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., dates to the 1920s and has played a role in countless scientific breakthroughs of the last century, including the creation of the old “Ma Bell” telephone network. Artists have been invited to bring their creative ideas into the lab starting in the 1960s with composers Edgard Varese, John Cage, and James Tenney.
Today Cluett is a resident artist at Bell Labs with an onsite studio where he pursues research in acoustics and multisensory technology. He also facilitates dialogue between the scientists and visiting artists who aren’t so tech-fluent. “I speak art and I speak technology and I can translate one to another,” says Cluett.
Long before Cluett signed up for high school band, music was a part of everyday life. His dad sang barbershop and his mom was in a choir. “It was a house full of music,” recalls Cluett, who taught himself guitar in the quiet of his bedroom. His musical guide stars at the time were punk bands like The Cure and Fugazi.
The family name Cluett, by the way, will have a familiar ring for local history buffs. Seth’s great-grandparents were Albert and Caroline Cluett who lived in the mansion at 59 Second St. in downtown Troy. In 1948 they bequeathed the home to the Rensselaer County Historical Society, now known as the Hartcluett Museum. Seth was raised in Poestenkill and says the family wealth was gone long before he arrived. His father, Allen, trained as a machinist in the Navy and supported the family by working at a factory in Valley Falls.
Cluett attended the New England Conservatory first as a voice major, then switched to composition in his sophomore year. Around this time it finally dawned on him that he’d already been composing for years, he just hadn’t realized it.
After earning his bachelor's at NEC, Cluett returned to the Capital Region for graduate work in the electronic arts program at RPI. During this period, Pauline Oliveros joined the faculty, the iear concerts were in full swing, and EMPAC was also beginning to produce events in anticipation of its eventual opening. “I loved being at RPI. The students were exciting and Troy was just starting to get weirder. It was an exciting time,” recalls Cluett.
Yet he didn’t linger. He interrupted his RPI studies for a year of work at the Harvard Institute for Music and Brain Science and later went to Princeton and earned master's and doctoral degrees in composition. While there he also met his future wife, Jennifer Eber
“This is the historic center of the universe I grew up in and the music I value. I left a tenure track to come here and be staff.”
— Seth Cluett
hardt. They’ve been married since 2009 and now live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Eberhardt works as a research librarian at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Cluett is a highly credentialed guy, but his accomplishments aren’t just in the academic realm. His work has been presented at festivals, galleries and museums across the U.S. and Europe. Concert halls, though, are the exception. Cluett doesn’t write standard performance pieces and so his venues aren’t standard either.
“I care about the sound as well as the social structures around my music,” he says. “It’s made consistent with my politics and values. There’s a freedom to the scores that’s meant to give agency to the performers.”
This alternative realm in which Cluett travels may conjure up notions of noise and histrionics. But his works are more soft spoken than demanding, more thoughtful than dramatic.
“My stuff is slow and pretty or immersive and sleepy. I’m inoculated from intense audience reactions,” he says.
In discussing his aesthetic aims, Cluett recalls having a visceral response to a 1993 Albany Symphony performance of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.
It prompted him to declare: “That’s what I want to do with my life, making music that makes people feel like that!”
Almost 30 years later, Cluett is still caught up with Bartok’s consummate craft, but he’s less intent on invoking specific feelings in the audience. He prefers more of an invitation.
“What I loved about the Bartok with the ASO were moments where you feel like you’re in a field in the countryside,” says the composer. “The piece evoked it, but it didn’t demand it. I’m against coercing someone, but I do like conversation.”