Discipline: Music Composition

Christopher Hopkins

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Ames, IA
MacDowell fellowships: 2022

Composer Christopher Hopkins specializes in electroacoustic music and dialectics among historical musical styles. His recent supporting research includes designs for experimental virtual composing environments, algorithmic musical logic based on historical models, and analysis of chord-color symmetries. Hopkins is also a performer of Renaissance and Baroque music for viols.

While at MacDowell, Hopkins produced new scholarly editions of 29 Contrapunti (Firenze, 1584) by Vincenzo Galilei, in transcriptions for all combinations of violas da gamba. This was the first phase of a larger project "Galilei Dialogues," which includes composing a new, contemporary musical composition for consort of viols based on Galilei's musical style and the music-philosophical ideas of Renaissance Humanism. The project received additional support from the Viola da Gamba Society of America, and the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University.

Studios

Kirby

Christopher Hopkins worked in the Kirby studio.

Erected in memory of Sarah L. Kirby, who had left a bequest to MacDowell, this studio was the first — and remains the only — brick building on the grounds. Built by local mason Augustus Beaulieu, the load-bearing masonry walls rest on a fieldstone foundation. The design of the boxlike building is simple and compact…

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