warbling elephant is a creative musician who as scholar and educator goes by Christopher J. Miller. As Teaching Professor in Music at Cornell, he directs the gamelan ensemble and steel band, and teaches classes on music in and of Indonesia and East Asia. He started his academic career as a composition major, studying with Martin Arnold, John Abram, and Michael Longton at the University of Victoria, then following Rudolf Komorous to Simon Fraser University. There he encountered both traditional Javanese gamelan and the innovative work of Indonesian composers such as AL Suwardi, Pande Made Sukerta, Rahayu Supanggah, and I Wayan Sadra, which had a more decisive impact on his path. The structural features of these musics, and the social conditions in which they are created and performed brought him back to a mode of music-making that emphasizes aurality and improvisation, while also leading toward collaboration. After studying with Ron Kuivila at Wesleyan University for his MA, where he also interacted with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton, he shifted his focus to ethnomusicology and scholarship, completing a PhD dissertation on contemporary art music in Indonesia. Since coming to Cornell in 2008, he has resumed his creative engagement with music, most prominently as a member of free-improvisation group CAGE. He has done two collaborations with Cynthia Stevens/INSITU.