About Me
Biography
Dayton Kinney creates music that has won and has been recognized in numerous national and international competitions. In Gramaphone, Dayton’s music has been described as “compelling single-movement designs.” Performed in the U.S. and abroad, Dayton’s music concentrates on “transforming the circle… into a spiral.” Through this notion, Dayton explores the limits of ambiguity in thematic material, accessibility, harmony, and form with the goal of striking a balance between the certainty of a circle and the ambiguity of a spiral. Her eclectic style is inspired by juxtapositions and accessibility, exploring the concept of tonal ambiguity through patterns, sectional comparisons, and repetition.
Performers who have played Dayton’s music include ICE, Nick Photinos, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, Deviant Septet, The Sirius Quartet, The Ciompi Quartet, HYPERCUBE, F-Plus, SOSDuo, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Zodiac Trio, The Grey Matter Ensemble, Frisson Duo, Space City Performing Arts Ensemble, and at Pittsburgh Opera, among others. Dayton’s piece, The Canary Who Sang, was recorded and published on the album Music On The Edge Volume 2 in 2020 by Navona Records.
Dayton earned her Ph.D. in Music Composition along with a Certificate in College Teaching from Duke University. Dayton Kinney also holds a Master of Arts in Music from Duke University, a Master of Music in Composition from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music cum laude with Honors in Music from Smith College. Her teachers have included John Supko, Leonardo Balada, Melinda Wagner, Salvatore Macchia, and Alla Elana Cohen.
Artistic Statement
Inspired by Paul Hindemith’s A Composer’s World, my music concentrates on the ambiguous idea of “transforming the circle… into a spiral.” This notion enables my exploration to discover the limits of ambiguity in thematic material, harmony, and form with the goal of striking a balance between the certainty of a circle and the ambiguity of a spiral.
My music focuses on thematic material that develops through harmonic and rhythmic ambiguity, while individual motivic content is repeated, juxtaposed, and transformed. This ambiguously developed material settles and nestles inside large-scale harmonic motion and the local trajectories of single pitches. The result is harmonic ambiguity, which I explore in all my works.
Against thematic and harmonic ambiguity, my formal organization balances and plays upon this same idea in two distinct ways. Each work unfolds either through a narrative established at the outset, or through a suggested stream-of-consciousness arrangement of materials. Through this unfolding, the musical material is often organized in delineated sections or more dreamlike, kaleidoscopic arrangements. This formal organization supports the balance between short-term motivic certainty against a larger ambiguous harmonic development.