Biography: Casey Patrick Mongoven

On April 30th, 1979, I was born to Jan and Danna Mongoven in La Jolla, California. I grew up in Carlsbad, California with my older brother Cory (b. 1976). When I was ten years old, I began to play electric guitar and shortly thereafter began to write my first music. At that time I was interested in heavy metal and hard rock. We would play and record with a four-track tape recorder. My brother would do detailed transcriptions of songs and program drums for the drum machine. We were often accompanied by Dean Robinson on guitar and Brian Snyder on drums.

In seventh grade, I met a fellow student, Matthew Stevens, who played piano. Enticed by the richness of the music he would play, and partially influenced by the classical music I had heard my brother playing as well, I began to quickly take exclusive interest in classical music. In eighth grade, I wrote my first piece in a classical style utilizing equipment in the Sherman Oaks studio of my uncle Tim Torrance; I used Performer as a sequencer and E-Mu Proteus 2 Orchestral sound module — a sound module which is particularly prevalent in film music of the time. I was very excited about the results and soon acquired my own software from my uncle in addition to my own Proteus sound module as well. In high school, I began taking composition and ear training lessons with a graduate student at UCSD, Nathan Phillips. In the summer of 1995, I attended the National High School Music Institute at Northwestern University. The following summer, I attended Interlochen Arts Camp, where I learned about Fibonacci numbers.

In 1997, I began studies under Alan Fletcher at New England Conservatory of Music. In my first semester, I began working with Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio. In 2000, I completed an essay which detailed important properties of Fibonacci pitch class sets which had not yet been discussed in the literature. At the conservatory, I wrote more than 20 works, all of which used Fibonacci numbers in some way. I graduated with a Bachelor of Music in Classical Composition with Academic Honors in 2001. At the same time, I was elected into the music honors society Pi Kappa Lambda.

In June of 2001, I moved to Vienna, Austria. There I took intensive courses for a year in German and Italian. In April 2002, ideas for a new style of music crystallized and I wrote the first works in the style of music characterized by mathematical objects fundamentally related to the Fibonacci sequence. After a year I left for California, leaving all of my belongings in Vienna and intending to come back. I spent six months in California where I continued to develop the nascent style. On New Year's Eve 2002, I moved to Berlin, Germany. There I became a CELTA-certified English teacher. After an unsuccessful attempt to find work as an English teacher in Munich, I moved to Halle in July 2003. I would spend the next year in Halle. This was followed by a move to Leipzig, where I moved in order to live where J.S. Bach spent his final years. In Leipzig, I sang with the Kammerchor Josquin des Préz for a year. After some time in Leipzig, I moved to Hamburg, where I sang in the Universitätschor and the Blankeneser Kantorei. In 2007, I began studies at the Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT Weimar under Robin Minard. There I began creating visualizations which were synchronized to my music. I completed my Ergänzungsstudium in Electro-Acoustic Composition in 2009. In September 2009, I began my Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology at UCSB. I am currently Ph.D. Candidate, working on my dissertation The Style of Music Characterized by Mathematical Objects Fundamentally Related to the Fibonacci Sequence. In addition to my studies, I teach second year German for the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semetic Studies.