Jon Appleton

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 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.

When he was six years old his mother married Alexander "Sasha" Walden (born in Ufa, Russia, in 1897), a double-bass player in the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra.

Appleton's parents were true believers in the Soviet Union and active members of the multiple left-wing organizations including the Communist party.

As a child Appleton studied piano with Jacob Gimpel and Theodore Saidenberg but preferred composing his own music rather than playing the works assigned to him (e.g. Chopin, Scarlatti, Prokofiev).

Simultaneously he studied composition with Andrew Imbrie at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborated with writer Willard S. Bain (1938–2000) writing musical comedies and was employed at the Macy's department store as an assistant buyer.

In 1970 Appleton also was influenced by the work of the "father" of computer music, Max V. Mathews and by French composers François Bayle, Beatriz Ferreyra and Michel Redolfi.

In 1969 Appleton's first recordings were published (Syntonic Menagerie and Human Music – the latter in collaboration with jazz musician Don Cherry – on the Flying Dutchman label,[3] produced by Bob Thiele.

In 1973 Appleton began his collaboration with engineers Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, which led to the creation of the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer and ultimately the Synclavier.

His difficulty with the Swedish bureaucracy led to his resignation and he returned to Norwich, Vermont, as a partner, for one year, in the newly formed firm New England Digital Corporation that had begun to manufacture the Synclavier.

He led a group of Dartmouth students to the Kingdom of Tonga and later received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to train radio personnel on the Micronesian islands of Chuuk and Pohnpei to record and broadcast their own music.

His stimulating interaction with composers from many nations led him to believe that a similar organization in the United States might help raise the profile of electro-acoustic music in his own country.

The decade of the 1990s saw Appleton spending increasing amount of time abroad: teaching at Keio University (Mita) in Tokyo, Japan, for three years and frequently visiting Moscow, Russia, where he was inspired by the enthusiasm of young composers.