Welcome! I’m a composer-improviser and trombonist, and I work in contemporary music worlds that are indebted to jazz and other experimental traditions. My career also includes university teaching, telematic production, intermedia collaboration, and research/writing.
I’m grateful to have had many generous mentors and collaborators who opened me to new worlds through their work, and I use this website as an ongoing archive for sharing my music, scores, writings, syllabi and more. Thanks for listening.
Bio
Michael Dessen is a musician and educator based in Southern California. As a composer and trombonist, he specializes in highly interactive, improvisatory music, and his work also includes university teaching, telematic production, intermedia collaboration, and research/writing. He is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he co-founded a PhD program in Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology (ICIT), and currently serves as Chair of the Music Department.
Dessen’s compositions blend abstract, immersive soundworlds with lyricism and groove, and often integrate technologies such as live sampling/processing and dynamic “scorestreams.” His work as a bandleader includes four critically-acclaimed albums on Clean Feed Records, and his music has been recognized with awards from Chamber Music America, New Music USA and the Fromm Foundation. He has also worked extensively since 2007 in telematic music, composing and performing on dozens of networked concerts with international collaborators and co-directing projects that have enabled diverse composers to experiment with this emerging medium.
As a trombonist, Dessen’s original sound and broad skills have made him a valued sideperson and collaborator for many renowned musicians. He has performed with Mark Dresser, Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, Anthony Davis, Marty Ehrlich, Lisa Mezzacappa, Dan Weiss, Christopher Tordini, Fay Victor, Yoon-Jeong Heo, Bae Il Dong, Santiago Botero, Cosmologic, and many others. He also performs solo on trombone+computer, and his solo electro-acoustic album Digibone Forest was released by indie label Accretions.
Dessen has worked to create new institutional collaborations through projects including Puentes Telemáticos / Telematic Bridges (2017-22), a program connecting high school students in California and Colombia to focus on the pedagogical and intercultural potentials of musical telepresence, and Cauces Sónicos (2025-26), a multilayered project co-directed with Wilfrido Terrazas that integrates educational and community engagement work with collaborative musical experimentation to explore a kaleidoscopic, expansive notion of the US-México borderlands. He has also published essays on the aesthetics and technologies of networked music, the racial politics of improvised music fields in academia, the Asian American creative music movement, and intercultural African diasporic collaboration, as well as a Preface to Yusef Lateef’s Songbook.
Michael Dessen grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and his music training includes diverse freelance experiences, graduate studies with Yusef Lateef, George E. Lewis, and Anthony Davis, and degrees from UC San Diego (PhD), UMass Amherst (MM) and the Eastman School of Music (BM). He lives in southern California with his longtime partner, artist Mariángeles Soto-Díaz.
Contact
Please contact me by email: mdessen@uci.edu. I am also technically on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook, but I am not very active on social media.