Benjamin Boretz

Benjamin Aaron Boretz[1] (born October 3, 1934) is an American composer and music theorist.

He graduated with a degree in music from Brooklyn College in 1954, studied composition with Tadeusz Kassern, and later studied composition at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Irving Fine, with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music Festival and School, with Lukas Foss at UCLA, and with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions at Princeton University.

Boretz was one of the first composers to work with computer-synthesized sound (Group Variations II, 1970–72).

In the late 1970s and 1980s he converged his compositional and pedagogical practices in a project of real-time improvisational music-making, culminating in the formation at Bard College of the music-learning program called Music Program Zero, which flourished until 1995.

Boretz is a co-founder, with Arthur Berger, of the composers' music journal Perspectives of New Music[3] and in 1988 founded (with Elaine Barkin and J. K. Randall) Open Space (publications, recordings, scores) and, in 1999, The Open Space magazine (with Mary Lee A. Roberts), which he edits with Dorota Czerner, Tildy Bayar, Jon Forshee, Dean Rosenthal, and Arthur Margolin.