By Bao Ong

Sam Pluta always had an independent streak. As soon as he was old enough to choose his own clothes, he refused to wear any piece of clothing with a visible logo; he would keep the same outfit on for an entire week before he would let that happen. When he is on the campus of Columbia University, where he is working toward a doctoral degree in musical arts, Pluta avoids Starbucks and would rather walk out of his way to buy a black coffee at the local, mom-and-pop Hungarian Pastry Shop than shelling out his money at a chain.

Although Pluta hesitates from labeling his defiance of the mainstream as rebellious or part of the counter-culture movement, his need to rebuff the mainstream continues. Pluta’s artistic passion is focused on his love for electronic music, the one all-consuming area of his life. Aside from his artistic friends and colleagues, not many people around him understand or embrace electronic music, a fact that only makes Pluta, a young-looking 30-year-old, more motivated to expose them to new sounds. He explains that his creative pursuits result in sacrifices: an affordable apartment far from school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a schedule that requires him to juggle school, performing in a band, teaching at a summer music school, recording various ensembles for a new music collective and the occasional freelance gig building Web sites to help pay his bills.

Pluta doesn’t look like the way his music sounds. His clothes reflect his personality: calm and confident, with a hint of an outgoing side with his cowboy shirts. His music, however, is in-your-face and the sounds challenge you to think beyond conventional melodies and harmonies. Pluta combines his strong computer science background with his knowledge of composition to create music on his laptop. One moment there could be a film clip of Bruce Lee fighting layered with unrecognizable chatter and the next a quiet, growing crescendo of a buzzer-like tone punctuated in a blast. While he wishes more people appreciated electronic music, he does not go out of his way to gain attention by composing loud or frenetic pieces to simply gain attention. Pluta explained that he believes the hard work is worth it because music is his passion. When he begins any project, he feels the need to finish it, said Pluta, as he quickly ran his fingers through a mop of chocolate brown hair. In a recent New York Times review, critic Ben Ratliff described Pluta’s role as a “boon and interpreter” as he “made the loud parts juddering and the soft parts misty.”

“I don’t have to do this, but at the same time, I do,” Pluta said without hesitation, about his career. “There are plenty of jobs I could do with my tech background, but it’s not what I need to do to make me who I am — the creative, always-looking-for-the-new type guy.”

Pluta considers himself an electronic musician aspiring to gain mainstream acceptance for “noise” music and to one day expose the role of his work in more New York establishments. It is often a challenge for this young man, whose affection for the creative and avant-garde is constantly weighed against the expectations of entering adulthood — earning enough money, owning a home, establishing a career — after his expected graduation from Columbia in about two years. He already performs regularly with a band at the experimental space Monkey Town in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but he has also stood on stage with George Lewis, the highly-respected trombonist, and held his own while keeping up with every note. Pluta’s early memories, however, of embracing music and how some of his family and teachers did not foster his initial interests still remain with him today. Whether he is in the studio recording for his record label, teaching other students how to compose music with computers or grappling to find a new performance venue, Pluta said he plans to keep pursuing his passion.

When Pluta looks back at his reasons for pursuing electronic music, he said the reasons are pretty simple. He was a good computer programmer but not a great programmer. He was a solid musician but not a superstar in the making. But the two skills combined, Pluta said, meant he could compose electronic music better than most people. “He’s very dedicated at taking a very broad idea of what music means and performing means,” said Douglas Repetto, one of Pluta’s Columbia professors, who is also the director of research at the Computer Music Center. “He really likes to explore what’s possible.”

* * *

On a damp November evening, Pluta double and triple-checked that his silver Apple MacBook Pro — his instrument — was properly attached to all of its various wires almost two hours before he stepped on stage with George Lewis. The pair performed as part of a 28-hour fundraiser for the non-profit Arts for Art, a local organization that supports New York artists and groups. The event was held in a gutted church at the Clemente Soto Velez Center on the Lower East Side. Audience members entered a dark open room with black walls that was lit with a few purple florescent lights, nearly two dozen metal folding chairs stand in the center and two rows of church pews flank the edges of the stage. The audience is a mix of aging Baby Boomers and young arty, hipsters. During one set, Pluta chuckled when a drummer created a scratching noise, which he said afterward was ironic because it mimicked a 90s style of music while the sounds were clearly modern jazz.

The trio of jazz musicians went over their allotted time, but Pluta remained calm. He performs in a number of New York venues but on this occasion, it was the first time he shared the spotlight in public with Lewis, the highly-respected trombonist, who also taught him composition for a year at Columbia. When the pair stepped on stage shortly after 8 p.m., Pluta sat across from Lewis in a metal chair. For twenty minutes, there was no silence as Lewis motioned up and down making animal-like noises — calls from monkeys and ducks — with his trombone, and Pluta quickly pecked away at the computer creating scratchy noises. It was all improvised. At times it feels as if the two were bantering back and forth. Pluta, focused on his computer, nodded and smiled the entire time.

Still grinning, Pluta described the set as intense. He characterized Lewis as the ultimate improviser, which made his job easier. “I feel invigorated,” Pluta said. “When you make this kind of music, you feel more than satisfied with all the work.”

Pluta’s music is part of a vibrant contemporary-classical scene in New York. The music can be minimalist, dense and difficult to grasp. His music is at the noisier end of the avant-garde spectrum but it also has periods where the sounds are graceful. Pluta is constantly trying to discover new sounds, sometimes they work and other times the audience is left not knowing what to think.

In the audience, however, some people nodded off or scrolled through their BlackBerrys. One man, Gregory Smith, didn’t praise the music but he did say that some electronic music he’s listened to before was dreadful. “My feeling generally is that I may or may not like an artist when I first hear them,” Smith said. “But their job is to lay it out there, and I’ll make a decision.” Smith said he needed a traditional jazz rhythm to understand the music. This is a typical response from a lot of people who listen to Pluta’s music for the time, he said.

* * *

Music in Pluta’s life took a page out of music composition: it sparked with plenty of curiosity, slowed down and later picked up again. He grew up in the small but growing town of Ellington, Connecticut, which, he jokes, has a population of 13,000 people and 16,000 cows. (The population today is closer to 14,000.) His father, Frank Pluta, played golf and encouraged his son and daughter, Sara, to play sports. For years, Pluta played football, baseball, basketball and golf. During middle school Pluta started taking keyboard lessons but felt that he had to make a decision between sports and music. Although there was not overt pressure to choose sports over music, there was a feeling that sports would be the most obvious choice for Pluta. It didn’t help, he said, that music education in his public school turned him away from music. He recalls singing a song in music class one day about Santa Claus being fat; any interest he had in music quickly faded.

Soon after Pluta’s parents divorced when he was 13, he moved with his mother to a small town near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Sports still continued to dominate his time but by his senior year of high school, he became interested in taking piano lessons again. Only after attending Santa Clara University in California with the intention of studying computer science did he begin to rediscover music. After listening to Stravinsky one day, he wanted to learn everything about 20th century avant-garde music. He decided to major in music and even though he only needed two or so classes to also major in computer science, he didn’t pursue it.

Pluta slowly discovered music was his calling after he worked at a military software company for a year in San Jose. His work included composing language for a tactical battlefield display program. Uninspired by the work, Pluta decided to pursue a master’s degree in composition and electronic music at the University of Texas at Austin, which combined his growing interest in music and strong computer science background. After three years in Austin, Pluta left his only significant romantic relationship with another woman and started his doctoral degree program at the University of Birmingham in England. He quickly discovered the program didn’t suit his interest in using multimedia to create electronic music. He knew he would rather quit the program than continue after the first year. After Pluta talked with his teachers, they decided to give him a master’s degree anyhow, which was unexpected on his end. This was the first time in his life that he had started something and not completed it. He didn’t know where he would go from here, but luckily, he said, he got into Columbia and moved to New York in 2006. It is here that he figured out electronic music would keep him the happiest.

The avant-garde style is only one facet of electronic music. From computer to electric guitar to synthesizer-generated compositions, people listen to electronic music all the time and don’t even realize it, Pluta said. It’s common to hear this music in Hollywood movies and dance tunes at clubs. The early forms of electronic music started in the late 19th century but is constantly changing as the technology evolves, fewer people have to be technically savvy to participate in electronic music. Pluta holds strong opinions about his electronic music.

“Part of a good sound is not knowing how it was made,” Pluta said. “You kind of have to enter a different consciousness. A catchy tune is pretty easy to write. I’m more interested in something that challenges you to focus in and think about what is.”

Suz Devaney, Pluta’s mother, said she has never really understood her son’s music, though she believes in its composer. She’s not surprised that he’s an artist because when he was two years old, she recalls, her son donned an elf’s hat at a St. Patrick’s Day event and started walking around the room and dancing. Everyone was charmed. She said she plays his music in her car while driving the freeways around Scottsdale, Arizona, where she lives and is retired from working as an executive secretary, and that “the more you play it, the more it grows on you. I can see why people follow it.”

“It’s interesting what he does, but I don’t understand it,” adds Frank Pluta, his father who still lives in Connecticut and sells construction tools part-time. “I interpret it as controlled noise.”

Pluta never pursued music for the money, his sister Sara said. Although he initially chose sports to most likely please their mother and father to some degree, his love of music has helped him mature through the years. It’s brought out the social side in him and also fit his inner rebel, she said. Pluta’s sister also recalls how her brother refused to wear any shirts with labels and felt more comfortable wearing their dad’s old golf shirt. He also went through a phase of dressing like a cowboy while living in England.

Pluta has spent the past few summers teaching at The Walden School’s summer music camp for kids and figures teaching will be a natural path for him if he can find a job in New York. He said it will be tough in this economy, but Repetto, one his Columbia professors, said Pluta’s strong computer and musical background should serve him well when he looks for a job.

Jeff Snyder, Pluta’s classmate, can relate to the situation. He said Pluta works hard and has many projects going on to keep him busy. They are in a band called Glissando Bin Laden and are members of a music collective called Wet Ink Ensemble. The music is experimental and often utilizes multimedia components — from televsion screens to instruments the musicians build themselves. Pluta also works on a freelance basis designing Web sites for a Brooklyn music company and in the summer he will teach again at The Walden School. Pluta wants to stay in New York because there are more venues here than almost anywhere else for artists interested in avant-garde music, especially in electronic music, in the United States. It also makes it more difficult to break though because there’s more competition and jobs are more difficult to come by. But the city’s challenges appeal to him, too. The diversity, the constant hustle and crowded public spaces serve as inspiration for his music.

* * *

In a recording studio at Columbia, Pluta sits quietly as violist Amy Cimini and bassoonist Katie Young perform a piece for Wet Ink. They do one take after another with Pluta only making small suggestions here and there. Like his performance style, in the studio he is calm but intense. The pair produce sounds that are part classical music and modern noise music with the plucking of strings and various plays on traditional tonal pitches. One can hear the breathing, hissing through the bassoon and raspy noises the viola projects. This is the type of music Pluta wants to produce.

There is a rich sound that is produced that fits the broad definition of electronic music. He listens to every phrase multiple times and asked detailed questions while letting Cimini and Young dictate the overall product. “That was a really good take,” Pluta said after one run where Young is strawberry pink in the face after moving her fingers quickly and bobbing her head through a solo run.

Pluta said he’s unafraid of what the future holds even though he has more than $60,000 in debt to pay off from school and doesn’t plan to make more than $50,000 a year at any point. He is comfortable with that decision. Pluta said he goes back into his memory of performances with people such as Lewis or his band mates to remind him of why he loves electronic music. He wants to discover new sounds and challenge what people interpret as music. As Pluta’s roommate, Trevor Hunter, also a music journalist, says, “Sam’s music is extreme. He operates in extremes. Some of it is beautiful, some aggressive. He’s concentrating on sound and structure more than anything else. You don’t go for Sam’s music for melody or anything like that. It’s in your face and well put together.”

Pluta expects to graduate in 2011, and his dissertation will revolve around a computer program he’s working on that allows an artist to move quickly between different electronic instruments. “I want people to understand my music as new information. But even if they don’t, I’m still going to do it. What I want is for them to give it a chance.”

If people give electronic music a chance, they will only grow more comfortable with it, he said. He went through the same process, it just happened more quickly. It’s through his music that he has been able to find his passion in life. Whether it will be through teaching or performing, Pluta said electronic music is something he will always pursue. It’s just up to everyone else to do the same. He will continue to experiment with sound through his computer, one key, one note at a time.