Joel Chadabe

Joel Chadabe (New York, 12 December 1938) is an American composer associated with electronic music and, in particular, with the concept of interactive composition, a contribution regarded as innovative within the field.

He trained at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1959, and then at Yale University, where he earned a master's degree in 1962. Among his teachers was Elliott Carter, while Earle Brown and John Cage also exerted a significant influence on his thinking. For many years he taught at the State University of New York at Albany (1965-1998), where he set up an electronic music studio, and he also taught at Bennington College.

His line of work begins in 1966 with a project for a fully automated synthesiser, realised in collaboration with Moog. From the CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music System) emerged a method that allowed an entire work to be sequenced from a pseudo-random chain of musical events, which were then manipulated segment by segment. From 1970 onwards this procedure, which Chadabe calls algorithmic composition, was his principal way of composing. Around 1972 he returned to writing for acoustic instruments combined with electronics, and in 1981 he coined the expression "interactive composition" to describe these pieces.

To bring interactive music to international stages, he developed with Roger Meyers a computer program, the PLAY Program, which controlled a portable analogue synthesiser. Later, from 1984, he worked with a Synclavier II on the design of a standalone instrument. At the beginning of 1986 he joined the software engineer David Zicarelli, and together they created the first version of the MIDI instrument "M", designed to run on a Macintosh computer. All his compositions between 1987 and 1994 use that software.

His works range from timbral textures of great rhythmic complexity to catchy melodies with lighthearted rhythms, and in many of them his fondness for American popular music of the 1920s to the 1950s is evident. Besides composing, he gave numerous lectures on electronic music and was co-founder and president of the Electronic Music Foundation, dedicated to archiving and disseminating all aspects of electronic and computer music.