Tim Clark

Tim was born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began his career in music at the age of four, studying piano with his mother, Elizabeth, who was a concert pianist.

"When I was 12 I discovered jazz and the band director of my school taught me what was going on. In high school I started writing tunes for the groups I was playing in and that led me to more serious study of composition.

"I wound up at the Eastman School as a composition major and spent a lot of years learning to write totally inaccessible music. But in 1968 the school installed one of the first Moog synthesizer studios and once I got my hands on it, I was hooked.

"A couple of years after I graduated I was hired as composer-in-residence at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York. I did electronic music there and then at the McLaughlin Planetarium in Toronto, Ontario for the next 14 years. At the same time I was working with Tom Lopez at ZBS Foundation on a new kind of radio drama. We started with 'The Incredible Adventures of Jack Flanders' in 1976. We're still working together today."

In 2000, Tim and his wife, Linda, moved to the mountains of North Carolina and together they started Elk Fork Studios. Then, in 2005, John Richards invited Tim to the first rehearsal of Hot Duck Soup..."I showed up with a synthesizer and I knew right away I had to find some other instrument. A friend and I built a washtub bass from some plans we got from Warren Yates, a local bluegrass musician, and I finally found the instrument I was born to play."