An American composer dies at 83
RIPThe electroacoustic pioneer Jon Appleton died last Saturday of pneumonia, his son reports.
Jon founded one of America’s first electronic music studios at Dartmouth College and taught there for 42 years.
He also helped found the Theremin Centre for Electronic Music at the Moscow Conservatoire.
He was a virtuoso on that instrument, and on the synclavier.
This is so sad. Just five years ago (has it been that long?) we lost another electroacoustic pioneer, Samuel Pellman. That generation is getting smaller each day. RIP.
No “composer” in the art music scene has even had a clue about how to make electric or electronic music, except for how to make it boring.
It is always amazing the low life people on this board who will take the time to say something nasty about someone recently deceased. And this is a perfect example.
And this is a perfect example of an exception to the rule….
A consummately professional academic. They make more of them now than they used to….
The simple controller Jon is using in the video presents some complex issues. Musicians think with both their bodies and the minds. And yet that controller does not require a very complex, intimate, or slowly evolved body-mind knowledge to play. The performance is facile and as a consequence, so is the music. It is exactly the inefficiency of our traditional instruments and the long process of mastering them that lends them their profound expressive qualities.
We may find that there is no quick path to putting the body in music, and that without the long, existential process of making an instrument and the body-mind one, we weaken cognitive structures that are essential to musical meaning. Conceptualism as a refuge for a lack of ability does not solve the problem. Technical, aesthetic, and philosophical strategies for solving this complex problem formulate a large part of the future of computer music.
To put it a bit more bluntly…
Appletons ‘ compositions at their best reminded me of the intro to ‘ Looney Tunes’ though I think the latter is artistically much more satisfying. Jon will be seated on top of a Van de Graaf generator for all eternity
Lest anyone think my above comment about Jon’s work seems out of place in an obit notice, I should mention I value a different way of remembering composers. It seems like we ignore them all their lives, then deliver a few pious words at their death, and then forget them and the work completely. I feel the greatest respect that can be given even in these sad moments is to engage with their work, to show that it leads to thought, and that it will remain a living memory we build upon.