Background
Moorefield was born into a family of musicians and teachers.
Moorefield was born into a family of musicians and teachers.
Moorefield attended the American School in Zürich, giving various performances as a drummer-composer in Zürich at the age of 17.
Moorefield"s work focuses primarily on live acoustic performance, electronic processing of acoustic signals, and live visual music ("Five Ideas About the Relation of Sight and Sound"). CDs of his composer-led ensembles have been released on several labels, including Tzadik, Cuneiform, and Innova. His compositions are informed by his identity as a drummer.
He is also the author of "The Producer As Composer", published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
At the age of five, he began drumming. By the time he was ten, he spoke three languages fluently, the result of having gone to public elementary schools in Italy, the United States, and Switzerland.
He then received a Bachelor of Arts and an Master of Arts in English from Columbia University, where he was a student of Edward Said. In 1979, Moorefield moved to the East Village of New York City and began a career as a composer, teaching himself along the way.
His first recording, Transformations, scored for big band with electric guitars and horns, appeared in 1983.
In the mid-Eighties, he began performing with rock bands such as Damage and K-Martians, which led to a stint with the proto-industrial band Swans. Around the same time, Moorefield joined the Glenn Branca Ensemble, touring and recording with them until 2008. Beginning in 1994, Moorefield has released CDs of his composer-led ensembles on various labels.
In the early Nineties, he led a nine-piece group that performed meticulously notated avant-rock in Europe and the United States. Foreign performances at various festivals in the mid-Nineties as well as on his Tzadik Records release, Moorefield experimented with a loosely structured hybrid between compositional and improvisational processes, coining the term "comprovisation" to describe his work of that period.
In 1998 Moorefield received an Master of Fine Arts in composition from Princeton University, where he studied with Paul Lansky, and a Doctor of Philosophy from the same institution in 2001. His dissertation, "The Producer As Composer", was published in expanded form as a hardcover (2005) and paperback (2010) by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
In the early 2000s, Moorefield began writing immersive intermedia works, at first collaboratively, and then as large-scale compositions. In 2013 he released a Digital Video Disc of a large scale piece performed on three continents, "Five Ideas About the Relation of Sight and Sound".
New York Times Timeout Neue Zürcher Zeitung Allmusic.
