Miller || Phelps

MILLER || PHELPS
Miller || Phelps is the duo of guitarist Alexander Elliott Miller and percussionist Ben Phelps, a new project from two Los Angeles composer-performers who have collaborated for over a decade.

Previously, Ben Phelps and Alex Miller worked as Co-Directors of the new music collective, What’s Next? Ensemble, alongside violist Jack Stulz and conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni. The group was called “ready for any mainstage keen enough to know what’s what” by Mark Swed of the LA Times, and collaborated with the Long Beach Opera, Grammy-nominated pianist Vicki Ray, and Dutch composer Jacob TV. What’s Next? Ensemble’s flagship series was the Los Angeles Composers Project, an annual festival that presented the works of over 60 Los Angeles composers in its five year run.

Miller || Phelps now continues that tradition, commissioning and presenting new works for percussion and guitar. For its first project, Miller || Phelps has commissioned composers Sarah Gibson, Ian Dicke and Hitomi Oba to write works for its debut concert, Public Domain, at the Tuesdays@Monk Space series in Los Angeles.

Alexander Elliott Miller is on the faculty of CSULB’s Bob Cole Conservatory of Music and Chapman University, and Ben Phelps teaches music at UCLA.

ALEXANDER ELLIOTT MILLER
Alexander Elliott Miller is a composer and guitarist whose music has been described as “wild…unearthly…lyrical…a voice worth listening to” (San Francisco Classical Voice) and “deceptively laid back in an LA way…inventive….unconventional” (LA Times).

His compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall and London’s Mile End Art Pavilion; he has collaborated with Grammy nominated musicians including pianists Vicki Ray, Aron Kallay and soprano Tony Arnold, as well as many contemporary classical ensembles and organizations such as HOCKET, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Earplay New Chamber Music, the Boston New Music Initiative, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, Panic Duo and Duo Montagnard among others. His music has also been heard on the programs of many California based venues and series including San Francisco’s Center for New Music, Hot Air Festival and ODC Theatre, and Los Angeles’ Piano Spheres, Tuesdays at Monk Space, Hear Now Festival, Synchromy, People Inside Electronics, Carlsbad Music Festival, Microfest and the LA Conservancy. He has received honors including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Earplay Donald Aird Composers Award, a Definiens C3 Commission and the CAPMT Commissioned Composer Award.

In the fall of 2018, his album TO….OBLIVION: Historic Landmarks Around Los Angeles was released; the work is a collection of pieces inspired by six lost landmarks in LA, each of some social significance, scored for solo electric guitar, sound effects and video.

Miller is on the faculty of California State University Long Beach and Chapman University, where he teaches music theory and composition. He holds degrees from USC, the Eastman School of Music and the University of Colorado at Boulder. www.alexanderemiller.com.

BEN PHELPS
Called “feisty” and “impressive” by the LA Times, Ben Phelps lives in Los Angeles, where he is a percussionist, composer and amateur urban planning enthusiast.

He has performed and collaborated extensively with many local chamber and new music groups, including What’s Next?, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, The Definiens Project, WildUp, and the pioneering multimedia based theater company Rogue Artists Ensemble. In 2009, in conjunction with What’s Next?, a leading post-classical new music event and performance collective in Southern California, he founded the Los Angeles Composers Project, the most comprehensive survey of local music from composers of all stages of their careers in Southern California. His newest project, The B Band, is an eclectic “classical band” created for performance in both clubs and the concert hall. More commercially, he has toured the world as an assistant conductor for Lord of the Rings Live, presenting the entire score performed live by an orchestra to the films, and his orchestration of Nino Rota’s ballet La Strada is in repertoire at the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich, Germany.

His music has been performed by the likes of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Argus String Quartet, pianist Vicki Ray, the Bass Clarinet Duo Sqwonk, and by percussion ensembles across the country, including The Los Angeles Percussion Quartet and Talujon Percussion Group, and many more.

Phelps is also an accomplished percussionist. He has had the pleasure of working with such luminary living composers as Steve Reich, Thomas Adès, Michael Gordon, and John Adams. Steve Reich called his performance of Nagoya Marimbas at a concert honoring Reich’s 70th birthday “the best I’ve ever seen- and I don’t say that,” and the Huffington Post has called him “a magician of the marimba.” He can be heard performing frequently as a percussionist with orchestras in the Southern California area as well on locally recorded film and television soundtracks. His work with the pioneering theater company Rogue Artists Ensemble has been called “enchanting” by the LAWeekly and “sonically brilliant” by the OCWeekly.

Phelps holds a BA and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a DMA in music composition at University of Southern California. He can currently be found teaching music theory and composition at UCLA.