Jon Appleton

Jon Howard Appleton (Los Angeles, 4 January 1939) is an American composer associated with electronic music, one of the figures who helped bring this idiom into university teaching and into live instrumental practice. He grew up in a musical family, studied the piano and began composing as a child.

His training included Reed College, where he graduated in 1961, and the University of Oregon, where he took his master's degree in 1965. There he worked with Homer Keller and developed an interest in electronic composition, which led him to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center between 1965 and 1966, where Ussachevsky was among his teachers. After a year of teaching at Oakland University, he joined the music department of Dartmouth College in 1967, where he founded the Bregman Electronic Music Studio.

In the 1970s he collaborated on the development of the Synclavier, a polyphonic digital synthesiser that was manufactured commercially and which is reputedly the first instrument of its kind to employ microcomputers. His career also included directing the Stiftelsen Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm in 1976, and teaching at Keio University in Japan, at the Theremin Center in Moscow and at MIT. In 1973 and 1979 he took part in projects recording and disseminating traditional Polynesian and Micronesian music. He received Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships.

His electronic works tend to have tonal roots and retain techniques inherited from Western music, although realised with the help of technology. In some pieces of musique concrète he exploits the tension between the extramusical associations of recorded sounds and their potential for musical development. His later works are mainly tonal compositions for instrumental and electroacoustic ensembles. As a writer he has addressed the aesthetics, theory, technology and social role of music, with titles such as The Development and Practice of Electronic Music (1975) and 21st-Century Music Instruments: Hardware and Software (1989).

His legacy rests on the integration of digital technology with the tonal language, and on his work as a teacher and promoter of electronic music in the academic sphere.