Walter Thompson (composer)

After receiving a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts,[1] he moved to Woodstock where he studied composition and woodwind with Anthony Braxton for 8 years.

[3] Soundpainting is a multi-disciplinary live-composing sign language for varied kinds of artists (musicians, actors, dancers, visual artists…).

In the summer of 1974, he invited 25 musicians from the Creative Music Studio and 7 dancers from the Woodstock Playhouse to gather and form a multi-disciplinary orchestra.

In 2001 Thompson won a Sebastià Gasch FAD Award for Soundpainting for "creating a ritual of musical, instrumental and vocal improvisation that involves performers and subsequently the audience through a code of gestures capable of mixing qualities, frequencies, volumes and all types of nuances, and which ends up creating a highly effective physical and sensorial effect.

[10] Over the course of his career, he has shared the stage with numerous musicians and artists such as George Cartwright, Tom Varner, Roy Campbell Jr.[8] Thompson has composed soundpainting pieces with many contemporary orchestras in many cities around the world, including Barcelona, Paris, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Oslo, Berlin, Bergen, Lucerne, Copenhagen, and Reykjavik, among others, and has taught Soundpainting at the Conservatoire de Paris; Eastman School of Music; Iceland Academy of the Arts; University of Michigan; Grieg Academy in Bergen, Norway; University of Iowa; Oberlin College Conservatory of Music; and New York University, among many others.