"I asked him if he'd be willing to teach me to write music," Ernste says. And Gardner agreed, teaching Ernste, who was an amateur guitarist at the time, fundamentals like harmony and sight singing.
"So that was the beginning. That was when I kind of began to see the depths of what music had to offer. I was somebody who wanted to be an engineer, wanted to build things and understand the broader concepts - now I saw something in front of me that had all that."
And it was those first few lessons that would eventually lead the Rochester, Minn. native to where he is today - an assistant professor of composition and electronic music at Cornell, and director of the University's new Electroacoustic Music Center.
For Ernste - who received his master's degree in music composition from the Eastman School of Music in 2004 after graduating the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997 - the center is all about community. He envisions a place where anyone can work on something that interests him or her.
"[For instance,] someone's in there working out some DJ stuff for a thing they're doing tonight," he says, pointing arbitrarily to a room in the hallway. "And someone's in here doing an installation for the Johnson, while someone's in there doing bioacoustics. And rather than having the doors shut, quiet to the building, you leave them open."
Though he doesn't have a particular agenda, Ernste thinks that with recent advances in technology, there's no reason he can't create a space where all these things are possible. "The diversity of this place comes from the people who work here," he says. "I get these extraordinary students who are doing engineering, students who are doing computer science, students who are doing pre-med."
And these students find creative uses for things that he wouldn't have ever imagined, Ernste says.
Ben Slovis, a senior biological science major in the pre-med program, first met Ernste the fall of his junior year when he took Introduction to Digital Music. It was Ernste's first year lecturing at Cornell and Slovis was immediately impressed. "Kevin's style of teaching is laid back," he says. "He expects creativity and nothing more." For the final project, students from both Slovis's class and Ernste's Computers in Music Performance class performed a concert. Being a biology major, Slovis mixed his interests and organized a piece that read the genetic code of a bacterial plasmid and then played music based on the sequence.
Meanwhile, senior Suneth Attygalle, a biological engineering major, took Ernste's advice to go outside the box of "conventional" techniques and think deeply about his musical creations. "For my final project for Music 220," Attygalle says, "a group of students and I created an active musical environment using machine vision cameras that detected the location of the listener. The listener could trigger sounds by moving to certain locations." This would then set off various incantations of "Frere Jacques," he says, while the environment responded emotionally with giggles or cries depending on how many people were participating.
Not only has Ernste been impressed with and learned a lot from his students, but his colleagues have also been welcoming.
"Xak Bjerken will throw his head on the piano if you ask him to. Right away when I got here, he was one of the first people I connected with." An associate professor teaching private piano lessons and chamber music, Bjerken has known Ernste for just over a year. "He's doing a wonderful job," he says, "and is very generous with the students and with his colleagues. He's already raising the visibility of the Electroacoustic Music Center and reaching out to other departments."
Bjerken, who's been at Cornell for 12 years, worked with Ernste on a piece called "Long Path," which was written for Ernste's friend, a Taiwanese pianist. The arrangement calls for piano along with tape narration, fusing together a poem with music.
What has also aided Ernste in jumpstarting the Electroacoustic Music Center is the fact that the entire Music Department has given its full support. "There aren't any compartments within the department," Ernste says. "There's not a feeling of, 'Okay, over here they're doing this and that's not of interest to over here where they're doing this.' There's a real feeling that we're trying to do what we can to make sure that everything touches."
And to help everyone get the chance to create what they want, Ernste finds the best software he can. An avid supporter of open source programs, which are applications anyone can alter and are freely available to the public, Ernste has contributed to a large Linux project called Turn Key Linux Audio. That in turn was contributed to another project at Stanford called Planet CCRMA (pronounced "karma").
"Essentially," Ernste says, "it's a distribution of free audio software all put in one place, all designed to install instantaneously with one command. And so people can go get it and have a very, very high quality free software environment for no cost." Because his students have such a rich, deep understanding of their own fields, Ernste says, the Electroacoustic Music Center needs to be completely open with all different kinds of tools available.
"If this was just a recording studio, what's that going to do? Or if I just show them three applications, that's not going to do it, because some kid's going to come up to me and say, 'I want to translate a DNA sequence into a piece.' And what am I going to say to that kid if all I've got is something that will record a microphone?"
Spencer Topel, a graduate student and teaching assistant currently pursuing his D.M.A. in composition, works closely with Ernste. "He has been extremely supportive of my endeavors, as well as those of my colleagues," Topel says. "Kevin is someone who is driven by achieving personal perfection - he rarely accepts a solution at face value. He also has a great fondness of composers who create expressive, humanistic electronic music."
And Ernste's interest in humanism and community is part of what drives him. A processional piece he wrote for the opening of Bailey Hall on October 26 is based on the African concept of "ubuntu," meaning humanity through others. "You're only a human being through your connection to other people," Ernste explains.
"That has a lot to do with my larger sense of the world as it is now." Because of his love of community, Ernste isn't interested in writing music for single performances. "A lot of composers are fine with that," he says. "I'm not in it for that. I'm in it for creating relationships with people and ensembles - and that can be used for music making that goes on."
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