Jon Appleton
Jon Howard Appleton (January 4, 1939 – January 30, 2022) was an American composer, an educator and a pioneer in
electro-acoustic music. His earliest compositions in the medium, e.g. "Chef d'Oeuvre" and "Newark Airport Rock" (1967) attracted attention because they established a new tradition some have called
programmatic electronic music. In 1970, he won
Guggenheim,
Fulbright and
American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships. When he was twenty-eight years old, he joined the faculty of
Dartmouth College where he established one of the first electronic music studios in the United States. He remained there intermittently for forty-two years. In the mid-1970s, he left Dartmouth to briefly become the head of
Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)
(sv) in
Stockholm, Sweden. In the late 1970s, together with
Sydney Alonso and
Cameron Jones, he helped develop the first commercial
digital synthesizer called the
Synclavier. For a decade he toured around the United States and
Europe performing the compositions he composed for this instrument. In the early 1990s, he helped found the
Theremin Center for Electronic Music at the
Moscow Conservatory of Music. He also taught at
Keio University (Mita) in
Tokyo,
Japan,
CCRMA at
Stanford University and the
University of California Santa Cruz. In his later years, he devoted most of his time to the composition of instrumental and
choral music in a quasi-
Romantic vein which has largely been performed only in France, Russia and Japan.
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