Dan Albertson, born in Michigan (USA) in 1984, is unsure how to describe himself, since his work encompasses several fields. He is active in a variety of endeavours related to language, lexicography, music, musicology, poetry, and translation.
Since he was in high school, in 2000, he has worked on The Living Composers Project, an ever-growing catalogue of information on the lives and works of more than 4700 contemporary composers from 99 countries.
He has served as editor of multiple volumes of the British journal Contemporary Music Review dedicated to the composers Helmut Lachenmann (2004–05), Earle Brown (2007) and Aldo Clementi (2009, 2011), as well as a survey of modernism and the string quartet (2013–14) and a co-edited double volume with José Luis Besada on Spanish music beyond Spanish borders (2019). He has been a member of the editorial board of this same publication since 2014.
In addition to Contemporary Music Review, he has contributed English and German texts to publications in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Spain, including Komponisten der Gegenwart and MusikTexte. His programme notes have accompanied recordings on the labels ABLAZE Records (Australia/USA), BMOP/sound (USA), Bridge Records (USA), Cedille Records (USA), Deutscher Musikrat/WERGO (Germany), Metier Records (UK), Numérica (Portugal), Odradek Records (UK), and Stradivarius (Italy).
For the past 20 years, he has collaborated with Cybele Records in Düsseldorf, translating booklet texts for most of its CDs and SACDs. He has also translated such notes for the labels Alga Marghen (Italy) and Austrian Gramophone (Austria). In addition, he was a panelist at a symposium on the Western perception of Asian music during the Asian Music Festival 2010 in Tōkyō, served as the Festival Program Book Editor for the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago in 2016 and gave a lecture on José Maceda at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017.
His writings, mostly for the review La Folia (USA), gravitate toward arcane, eccentric and lesser-known music from the Renaissance to today.
He writes poetry to amuse himself and has never considered publishing it, but eleven composers have made settings of his poems since 2004.
His non-cultural interests include board games, train travel and various types of whiskey/whisky. He is an existentialist who insists that his only skill is "taking up space" for whatever time is allotted to him. In spring 2019, he began to pass this time outside his home country, living in Hong Kong from 2019–22 before entering an itinerant phase.
Catalogue
Current as of 7 January 2023.