Jon Appleton

Composer Jon Appleton was an electro-acoustic music pioneer. Drawn to the possibilities presented by the emerging soundscape of electronic music, Appleton, along with Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, developed the Synclavier, an early digital synthesizer that offered on-board sampling and recording. Appleton was a significant educator, teaching on and off for more than four decades at Dartmouth College, where he established an electronic music studio, among the first of its kind. Appleton was born in Los Angeles on January 4, 1939. His parents both worked at film studios, but his father left shortly after he was born. His mother remarried when he was six; his stepfather was a bassist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic and was an early musical influence. Appleton studied piano as a child, but through encouragement from his stepfather, and indifference to his assigned music, he began composing and performing his own music. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he composed music for his fellow students, then moved on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied composition with Andrew Imbrie. While there, he worked with writer Willard Bain on musical comedies. Appleton attended the University of Oregon for graduate studies, where his principal teachers included Homer Keller and Henri Lazarof. At the University of Oregon, he built an electronic music studio and experimented in the genre for the first time, which led to an invite from Vladimir Ussachevsky to study at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In 1967, after accepting and then resigning from a position at Oakland University in Michigan, Appleton began teaching at Dartmouth College. There, with a generous donation, he established the Bregman Electronic Music Studio. In the early '70s, Appleton began working with Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones, and together they created the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer and then the Synclavier, the first commercial digital synthesizer. Appleton toured the Synclavier to universities throughout the U.S., performing pieces he wrote for it. His works found success at electronic music festivals in Europe in the '80s, and he became a founding member of the International Confederation for Electro-Acoustic Music. He then helped establish the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) and served as its president for a time. In 1989, Appleton and composer David Evan Jones founded the electro-acoustic graduate program at Dartmouth. In the '90s, Appleton taught for three years at Keio University in Tokyo and regularly visited Moscow, where he guided Andre Smirnov in creating the Theremin Center at the Moscow Conservatory. During this time, Appleton began writing instrumental and choral music once again, including the operas HOPI: La Naissance du désert and Le Dernier Voyage. He continued composing and teaching into the 21st century, retiring from Dartmouth in 2009. That year, he authored the essay "How I Became a Russian Composer." Appleton died at his home in White River Junction, Vermont, on January 30, 2022.
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