Joseph Dillon Ford

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Joseph Dillon Ford (b. 6 February 1952, Americus, Georgia, USA) is an American composer, author, and educator.

He holds undergraduate degrees in music and graduate degrees in both musicology and landscape architecture. Although he focussed on keyboard performance during his college years, Ford completed his training at Harvard as a Variell Scholar specializing in historical musicology. He studied twentieth-century composers and compositional techniques with Ivan Tcherepnin, the works of Bach and Handel with Christoph Wolff, Dowland and the English lutenists with John Ward, and the music of medieval Aquitaine with David Hughes.

Continuously active as a composer, performer, and lecturer during his career as a teacher of the humanities at Miami Dade College and landscape architecture at Florida International University, his major works include a symphony, a piano concerto, a harpsichord concerto, and a large quantity of chamber and solo works for the piano and other instruments. Although most of his oeuvre is tonal—often very traditionally so, he has also produced non-tonal work using both acoustic and electronic media, and has even developed synthetic chromatic dialects amenable to both idioms.

In recent years he has published online Orpheus in the Twenty-first Century: Historicism and the Art-Music Renascence (2003), a multimedia e-book on music aesthetics; Chromatic One: A New Technique for Instrumental Speech (2003), a monograph detailing an innovative art form fusing music and spoken language; and numerous articles, poems, and short works of fiction.

Keenly interested in emergent music and telecommunications technologies and the rich potential they offer for international creative collaborations, he also conceived and brought to fruition numerous large-scale projects in which his interdisciplinary artistic background and design expertise have proven to be especially useful assets. These include the world’s largest sound sculpture, an ongoing Web-based work that commemorates the monumental “Standing Buddhas of Bamiyan” demolished by the Taliban in 2001; the “Westron Wynde” Project (begun in 2004), for which composers in the USA, Canada, and the UK each contributed music for James J. Pellerite (former principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra); the Delian Suite No. 1 (2005), a virtual keyboard recital in which composers living in the USA, Canada, and Great Britain convey through music the distinctive sense of place associated with landscapes for which they feel a special connection; the Delian Suite No. 2 (2006), a similar project in which composers from the USA, Canada, Great Britain, and South America explore spirituality, folklore, and the supernatural in works for a variety of media; and Nu Mu[sic!] Unlimited 2006, the world’s first virtual new music festival, with artistic contributions from both sides of the Atlantic.

Ford is the founder of the Delian Society, whose efforts to reinvigorate tonal music have attracted many composers and performers on six continents and have drawn attention to the accomplishments of other outstanding artists through an ongoing annual awards program.

Ford presently resides in Gainesville, Florida, USA.