John Eaton (composer), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

John Eaton (composer)

American composer

Date of Birth: 30-Mar-1935

Place of Birth: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, United States

Date of Death: 02-Dec-2015

Profession: composer, pianist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About John Eaton (composer)

  • John Charles Eaton (March 30, 1935 – December 2, 2015) was an American composer. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Eaton attended Princeton University, where he graduated in 1957 (Morgan 2001).
  • He later lived in Rome (1957–68), returning to Princeton to earn a Ph.D.
  • in 1970 (Anon.
  • & n.d.(c)).
  • He subsequently held faculty appointments at Indiana University (1970–92) and the University of Chicago (1989–99) (Morgan 2001; Anon.
  • & n.d.(b)). Eaton was a prominent composer of microtonal music, and worked with Paul Ketoff and Robert Moog during the 1960s in developing several types of synthesizer (Chadabe 1967; Frankenstein 1968).
  • Notably, he was involved in the development, use, and ultimately unsuccessful commercialization of the SynKet (Crab 2015).
  • He devised a compositional genre called pocket opera, operas scored for a small cast of vocalists and a chamber group, and composed such pocket opera works as Peer Gynt, Let's Get This Show on the Road, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Tommasini 2010; Grimes 2015). His operas include The Cry of Clytaemnestra (1980), a re-telling of some of the events surrounding the Trojan War from the perspective of Agamemnon's wife Clytaemnestra, which has been hailed as the first feminist opera.
  • It was premièred in Bloomington, at the Indiana University Opera Theater, on 1 March 1980, and received a number of subsequent productions, most notably in New York and California (Morgan 1992a).
  • Eaton's opera, The Tempest, with a libretto by Andrew Porter after William Shakespeare, was premièred at the Santa Fe Opera on 27 July 1985 (Rockwell 1985; Morgan 1985a), and subsequently performed in the autumn of 1986 at the Indiana University School of Music (Anon.
  • 2010). During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Eaton concentrated on works for smaller ensembles, including chamber operas that involved dramatic participation of the instrumentalists alongside the singers (Oestreich 2000).
  • He founded and directed The Pocket Opera Players, a professional troupe dedicated to the performance of his works in this genre, and occasionally those of fellow composers interested in the form.
  • He continued to lead the Pocket Opera Players in New York City, after his retirement from Chicago in 2001.
  • He was a recipient of the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship (Morgan 2001), and a MacArthur Fellowship (Anon.
  • 2008). Eaton died on December 2, 2015, following a brain hemorrhage.
  • His wife Nelda Nelson-Eaton and two children, Estela and Julian, survive him (Grimes 2015).

Read more at Wikipedia

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