The Musician
editPhil Christensen is a composer living in New York City who works in a wide variety of styles, including funk, blues, jazz, fusion, rock, avant garde, electronic, progressive rock, and many others. His influences are an equally large number of musicians, including (but not limited to) Frank Zappa, Trey Anastasio, Miles Davis, John Scofield, John Medeski, and Jaco Pastorius.
Phil has recently completed his Master's degree in Studio Composition at SUNY Purchase, where he studied with the avant garde composer Joel Thome. In the winter of 2006 Phil wrote the score for an off-off Broadway play called InsideOut, created by Live Project. Tracks from this show are available on Phil Christensen Music.
Prior to this, Phil earned a bachelor's in music from SUNY Oswego where he studied under Dr. Anthony Crain, and Dr. Julie Pretzat. A member of the Solid State jazz ensemble under the direction of Stan Gosek, Phil also directed the department jazz lab band, teaching newer players jazz standards and improvisational techniques. During this time he also studied with guitarist Carmen Caramanica in New Hartford, NY.
The Programmer
editPhil is the author of several open source projects, including modu, a web toolkit for Python, txOpenID, a Twisted-powered OpenID provider, txspace, a web-enabled MUD-like system for creating online games, and the Jam2 Drupal module, a tool for helping independent musicians manage their music online.
Other areas of expertise include application development, distributed computing, computational linguistics and networking.
People I Am Not
edit- Phil Christensen - the Mars Rover guy
- Phil Christensen - the pastor and worship music producer guy