Jon Appleton
Celebrates 70

March 13, 2009
Lori Napoleon

 

Born in Los Angeles in 1939, Jon Appleton celebrates his 70th birthday this month, to be commemorated by a retrospective concert on Thursday, March 19, at Electronic Music New York, an annual electroacoustic music festival at Brooklyn College. He was the first person to support EMF. In recognition of that support, and of his myriad accomplishments in a long musical career, we are preparing a profile on him and his work. It is appropriate that this is the first profile in a series of profiles that we plan to do on composers of electronic music. This brief article is the first item in that profile.

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Jon Appleton has been a lifelong devotee, practitioner and worldwide proponent of new music and electronic music. His ceaseless drive and curiosity has given rise to a life at the forefront of electronic music's development and generated work in other genres, including choral, orchestral, and chamber compositions music. He was among the founding members of the International Confederation of Electro-Acoustic Music and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. And he was co-developer of the Synclavier, the first commercially available digital synthesizer.

Appleton completed graduate studies at the University of Oregon and Columbia University, continuing on to create a varied body of works. His early works of the ‘60s involved the abstraction and manipulation of timbre and the usage of found-sound. Inspired by new opportunities for expression that musique concrète enabled, and armed with a hefty single-track recorder and loudspeaker, Appleton traversed the globe, collecting signature sounds of villages, cities and countries including Sweden, Kingdom of Tonga, Turkey, France, Russia and the United States. This pursuit culminated in compositions such as Times Square Times Ten (1969), described by Appleton as moving "from the street to lower and lower levels below 42nd Street and Broadway. Sonic objects from the past lurk in the subway tunnels and at times try to assert themselves again ..."

Excerpt from Times Square Times Ten

In 1967, Appleton relocated to Vermont and created the graduate program in electro-acoustic music at Dartmouth College, where he remained for more than forty years as composer and mentor to increasing numbers of students. He also served as director of the Bregman Electronic Music Studio. He explored the relationships between music, society, and technology and he developed the program that was conducive to cross-curricular dialogues among musicians, computer scientists, and engineers.

While working at Dartmouth, Appleton became concerned with the level of usability and control available in his analog studio. In his book 21st Century Musical Instruments: Hardware and Software, Appleton recalled that "it occurred to me that the various controls on a synthesizer could be computerized and thus connected automatically by typing a few commands on a computer terminal." He then sought advice from Sydney Alonso in the engineering school at Dartmouth. It was Alonso who first suggested coming up with a completely new digital synthesis instrument rather than making improvements to the existing analog system. Shortly afterwards, Cameron Jones, a computer programmer, joined them. One of the first kernels of thought proposed by this newly formed triumvirate was to build a digital oscillator bank that would be controlled by a freestanding mini-computer dedicated only to music.

The trio built the first prototype in 1972 and called it the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer. Appleton and many other composers used it in a wide range of compositions. Meanwhile, Alonso and Jones, with Appleton's ongoing musical advice, continued technical development during the following several years, and by 1977 they had invented the Synclavier as the first performance-oriented digital synthesizer. It was the first of its kind.

Jon Appleton playing the Synclavier, 1978.
Photo courtesy Jon Appleton.

The Synclavier came to be Appleton's primary composition tool for the next ten years. He toured with it through the United States, Asia, and Europe. He continued to offer musical guidance in subsequent models of the Synclavier, and what resulted was an integrated digital sampling and synthesizing workstation whose users could employ the same type of capabilities as modern software-based digital audio workstations in use today. Its powerful stature attracted a diversity of artists from popular to experimental genres, including film composer Alan Silvestri, Kraftwerk, Stevie Wonder, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Pink Floyd, Sting, Pat Metheny, New Order, Fad Gadget, the Cars, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Henke (Monolake).

Excerpt from In Media Res

Appleton is also an enlightening author, and the issues, concerns, and compromises he describes in the making of the Synclavier are as relevant now as they were then, especially with regard to the development of new interfaces for musical instruments.

He has taught at CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music an Acoustics) at Stanford University, the University of California in Santa Cruz, Keio University in Tokyo, and the Theremin Center at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. He has been a fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at M.I.T. and visiting composer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris. His awards include grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Program, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American-Scandinavian Fellowships. In 2003, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States.