Christopher Shultis is a writer, composer and scholar and currently Regents' Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico where he has taught since 1980. Recipient of two Fulbright awards, he has also taught at the Technische Hochschule Aachen (1993-94) and the Universität Heidelberg (1999-2000). He received his Bachelor of Music degree from Michigan State University, his Master of Music degree from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. At UNM, Shultis teaches courses in American music, twentieth-century music, popular music, composition and interdisciplinary fine arts. He regularly teaches courses for the Freshmen Learning Communities program and is an adjunct member of the Department of American Studies faculty. He has served as Artistic Director of the John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium since 2001.
Highlights of Shultis’ publication record include "'A Living Oxymoron': Norman O. Brown's Criticism of John Cage," for Perspectives of New Music (2006); "Saying Nothing: John Cage and Henry David Thoreau’s Aesthetics of Co-Existence," Tijdschrift voor Musiektheorie (1998), which was translated into German and published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (2007), "Cage and Europe," for the Cambridge Companion to John Cage (2002); “Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Non-Intention” for The Musical Quarterly (1995), and “Cage in Retrospect: A Review Essay,” The Journal of Musicology (1996) which won a 1997 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. His book, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition, was published by Northeastern University Press in 1998 and is one of two books recommended in the seventh edition (2005) of the Grout History of Western Music "for further reading" on John Cage. The other recommended book, John Cage: Music, Philosophy and Intention (2002), also includes an essay written by Shultis, "'No Ear for Music': Timbre in the Early Percussion Music of John Cage." He has served as an Associate Editor for Perspectives of New Music since 1999 and is currently working on a book-length comparison of musical experimentalism in the United States and continental Europe titled "The Dialectics of Experimentalism," from which one completed chapter will be published in The Music and Writings of Thomas DeLio by the Mellen Press in 2008.
Shultis has lectured on both musical and literary subjects in the United States, Latin America and Europe. A selected listing includes lectures at universities in Mexico City, Heidelberg, Aachen, Bielefeld and Düsseldorf, Germany, Olomouc, Czech Republic and Lublin, Poland; lecture series appearances at Princeton University (2007), Temple University (2006), the University of Maryland College Park (1995, 1997, 2005), Pennsylvania State University (1998) and the University of Virginia (1998); and papers read at the national meetings of the Society of American Music (1997, 1999, 2007) and the American Musicological Society (2005). In 1998, Shultis lectured on John Cage as part of the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany and in 1999 gave the same lecture as a keynote address for the Belgian Society of Anglicists in Brussels, Belgium.
As a composer and creative artist, selected performances include the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, the Society of Composers International Convention, the German American Institute’s (Heidelberg, Germany) Seventh Annual Festival of Experimental Music and Literature and the University of Illinois Composers' Forum. In 2003 he was awarded a residency from the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico and in 1993 KNME television produced a half-hour program, "Model and Reality," devoted to his creative work.
Shultis’ activities as a scholar and creative artist continually draw upon his previous activities as a solo percussionist and conductor of the highly acclaimed UNM Percussion Ensemble. As Director of Percussion Studies at UNM from 1980-1996, Shultis worked closely with many composers including, among others, Ernst Krenek, Lou Harrison, Michael Colgrass and John Cage. His performance of Konrad Boehmer’s Schreeuw Van Deze Aarde for solo percussion (BV Haast, 1990) won an Edison award for best new music recording and various ensemble performances under his direction can be found on the Neuma, Wergo and 3D labels.
Visit Prof. Shultis' website.
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