Event Details

Thursday, October 16, 2025, 8:00pm

Davis Hall

Guest Artist: Sean Hamilton, percussion

with 
Matt Andreini, percussion
Matt Glascock, cello
Brett Copeland, tuba

Like As In Flowers Growing In The Delicately Fallen Snow

Never Meet Your Heroes

About the Artists

“One of those holding the torch of progression of drumming” (Adam Arritola/Miami Psych Fest), Sean Hamilton is a percussionist, composer, improviser, and audio engineer whose creative practice focuses on moments, juxtapositions, and sonic opportunities. Working through hybrids of the improvised and the composed, his work is rooted in avant-garde and experimental music, free jazz/improvisation, electronic and electroacoustic music, noise, punk and metal, design and photography, and sound art. His work often exists through performance, composition, multimedia projects, and the meshing of analog and digital mediums. Touring extensively since 2015, Sean has performed in over thirty-five states and six countries, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Austria. Notable performances include the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, Interference Series, Skronk Sessions, Pool Improvised Music Series, the Racer Sessions, MOXSonic, and the SEAMUS National Conference. He is a frequent collaborator with other artists from disciplines both in and out of music, with notable collaborative projects including two weeks of creative research at the Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Choreographers and Composers Lab in Leeds, UK, ongoing duo collaboration with Nathan Corder under the moniker Mechanical Bull, and extensive collaboration with Tory Tepp for Earthtones, a project which combines land art, urban agriculture, and improvisational music making. Other various collaborations include work with Tatsuya Nakatani, Anne Malin, Klimchak, Damon Smith, Alex Cunningham, Eric Hall, Dave Stone, Lindsey Kelley Dance, Jacqui Dugal, Rogue Dance, Ron Coulter, Jonas van den Bossche, and Thomas Milovac. 
Lately, Sean’s practice has expanded to include 35mm photography and bookmaking practices. In 2024, he and graphic designer Stephen Parks created Superposition, a collaborative book project featuring digitally-manipulated 35mm photographs-turned-collages, printed on risograph and bound by Parks. An accompanying generative electronic composition was distributed via a flash drive integrated into the book’s architecture. Sean’s album Days of Impermanence, released in 2024 on Gotta Let It Out, is available with a limited edition handbound 35mm photobook designed to be a visual accompaniment to the musical album. Other book projects include “Artifacts for Another Time” and “This Instrument A Place”, both numbered editions of 35mm images, printed on risograph.

Sean holds a Master of Music degree in percussion performance and music composition from the University of South Florida and a BM in Music Education from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. In addition to his current creative practice, he also works as an audio engineer specializing in live sound production and teaches university courses in technology, improvisation, and popular music at Colorado Mesa University. He has presented guest lectures at over 25 colleges and universities in the US and UK. Since 2019, Sean has been based in western Colorado, where much of his time is spent traveling in his converted campervan for creative and recreational activities. In that time, he has covered over 100,000 miles, touching corners of the United States ranging from Seattle to San Diego and New England to Key West, with significant time in the high deserts and mountains of Colorado. 
Sean is proud to perform exclusively with Innovative Percussion sticks and mallets and Grover Pro Percussion instruments and accessories.

www.seanhamiltonmusic.com

About the Program

I wanted to include a few thoughts about my practice to provide context for the music tonight. My work as a percussionist is driven by three separate but coinciding and symbiotic qualities: timbre, or “tone color”, as a foremost element in the music, a rhythmic language driven by density instead of vertical alignment with a metronomic grid (no beats and no metronomic time or pulse), and the use of sonic “space” as a principal aesthetic (in pursuit of a meditative or trance-like state). I believe that there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” sound. Instead, all sounds are inherently valuable and can be utilized musically in a virtually limitless number of ways, primarily informed by the fundamental characteristics of that sound. A sharp, short percussive sound, or a screeching dissonant pitch collection aren’t good or bad, but instead have endless possibility as a tool or material that contributes to a larger musical idea. I strive to create sonic landscapes by taking these sounds, with their inherently unique properties, and assembling them in a broader musical moment. Additionally, improvisation is at its core, to me, a metaphor for life. It is a musical reflection of a unique moment, informed by the set of circumstances defined by the inherent and explicit properties of that moment. It is an encapsulation of everything and everyone that participates in that moment, which includes everything from the audience and the people in the room to their mood and the time of day, the weather, the setting, the acoustics of the space, and more. Similarly, I believe that we are constantly working within a set of limits that, too, is inherently determined by the circumstances of that moment. These boundaries are informed by and are a result of our personal livelihoods (in all contexts of the word) and influence things such as thought and action. As such, when you improvise as a performer, or take in a performance of improvised music, you take part in a special moment that can never again be created just exactly as it once were. Outside of the above, a good deal of my compositional interest lies in compositional- improvisational hybrids, graphic scores and non-traditional notations, and influence from visual art and design. Never Meet Your Heroes is one manifestation of these things; composed for a soloist or ensemble of any size or instrumentation, the score uses no traditional musical notation but instead is comprised of a variety of lines, images, pictograms, shapes, and text that make up “paths” and “areas” which guide the performer in their interpretation of the work. There is no prescribed duration or instrumentation for the work. I hope you enjoy the concert.

-SH, October 2025