Michele Senitzer is a composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist. She obtained a B.A. in Music with a focus in composition and electronic music from the St ate University of New York at Albany in 1993. While in New York, she put on a series of multimedia performance art shows featuring interactive dance, music, slides and video.

She moved to California in the fall of 1994 and currently sin gs, composes and plays guitar with her funk rock band the Sun Players. Michele is the resident composer for Eclipse dance group and composes scores for film/video and dance. She has also created a narrative cartoon radio show called the Lurk & Smirk s how. Her compositional mediums include string and percussion instruments with keyboards and midi/computer music.

She arrived at Mil ls College on a motorcycle armed with a backpack full of equipment and musical recordings, confidence and a sense of humor. She unleashed a recording of a score for a cartoon called the Lurk & Smirk Show that took me back to my years of watching Tom a nd Jerry.

She composes for herself but can and does compose pieces for specific audiences. For example, her cartoon scores are geared toward a younger audience than her interactive dance scores would be.
Her approach to composing is improvisational. Michele says: “I’m into experimentation as far as different instruments and different medias interacting.”

Her influences are as diverse as the music she composes and include Jerry Goldsmith, Carl Stalling (composer for the Warner Brothers cartoons) and Quincy Jones. She says one of her college pro fessors got her interested in Laurie Anderson and says: “I really admire her (Anderson’s) experimental mixed media.”

Michele feels that her biggest obstacles are “finding resources such as time, knowledge, and money. ” She uses the Internet as a great place to circulate her name and to keep up with what other composers are doing.

Her current projects include playing gu itar and singing with the Sun Players, working on soundtracks and immersing herself in studies of film composers because she says, “Right now I’m most interested in this narrative cartoon and I want to turn into a series.”
< /p>

Michele’s future goals include possibly attending graduate school, continuing her self-studies in music and composing scores for film, video, animation and dance. She has aspirations to author interactive CD-ROMs and to perform more mixed media shows. She wants to write and produce children’s music and shows, perform with the Sun Players, travel the world and live a lifetime of creativity.

You can c ontact Michele via email at msenitzer@hotmail.com and/or the Sun Players at HYPERLINK http://www.sunplayers.com or call 415-339-7420.

Discography:
My Tribe 1998 e.p. cd
The Lurk and Smirk Show
Experimental Fil m Soundtracks (check Michele’s website for mp3s)