Casimir Bonkerfield, PhD

Professor Bonkerfield is a researcher and lecturer in the fields of Alternative Historilogical Musicology and Historimusiconstructionism in the department of Synthetic Contemplative Media at the Bowery Institute. He has been working at the crossroads of Midwestern folk music marginalia and the creation of abstraction in psychophysiological ergodicity. His work centers on identity, radical centrism, and the moribund platitudes of commonality.

Really though?

OK, you caught me. Professor Bonkerfield is not actually a real professor, not even a real person. The Bowery Institute isn’t real either. This project is an experiment in creating ficitionalized history and joining it with my original music. It’s also a fun place to gently parody the self-seriousness of academics and journalistic non-fiction. This project is the brainchild of Will Stedden.

Below I’ve written a little about the backstory of my musical works. You can follow more on my viewfoil, and if you like what I create please support me on my Ampled membership page.

Origin of Guymon, OK

The music for Guymon, OK was written as independent pieces over the period from 2008 to 2016, with the main compositions being written on a hitchiking trip from Illinois to California in the summer of 2011. The bulk of the narrative was conceived and written while I had a fever in 2018.

Origin of Principle

The music for Principle is still forthcoming, but the original conceptualization started in 2007 as an attempt to evoke the process of studying fundamental physics as a ballet. The libretto was finished in 2009, but my capacity to compose in Csound at that time was too labor intensive to finish the project.