Dodge, Charles

Charles Dodge (b Ames, Iowa, 5 June 1942) is an American composer of computer music. His interest in computer music began during his undergraduate years at the University of Iowa (BA 1964) and his graduate years at Columbia University (MA 1966), where he studied music composition with Richard Hervig, Chou Wen-chung, and Otto Luening. It wasn't however, until he met Godfrey Winham at Princeton University that he thought seriously about the composition of computer music. Computer music is music generated with, or composed with the aid of computers. It also refers to a field of study that examines both the theory and application of new and existing technologies in the areas of music, sound design and diffusion, acoustics, sound synthesis, digital signal processing, and pyschoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origin of electronic music, and the very first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century. Much of the work on computer music has drawn on the relationship between music theory and mathematics. Dodge composed his most famous work, Earth's Magnetic Field, in 1970 and, in the following years, he composed two other works, Speech Song (1972), his first work for synthesized voice, and In Casando (1978), which controls two computer synthesized audio channels to a setting of the radio play by Samuel Beckett. At this time, he founded the center for computer music at CUNY's Brooklyn College and he taught at the CUNY Graduate Center. Currently, he is visiting professor at Dartmouth College. During his career, Dodge received a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as numerous awards for his compositions.

From the guide to the Charles Dodge papers, 1968-1982, (The New York Public Library. Music Division.)

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