Benjamin Boretz
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Benjamin Boretz is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century American composer and music theorist. Studied composition at Brandeis University (with Arthur Berger, at the Aspen Music School with Darius Milhaud, at UCLA with Lukas Foss, and at Princeton with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions). He was one of the early composers to work with computer-synthesized sound (Group Variations II, 1970-72). In the late 1970s and 1980s he converged his compositional and pedagogical practices in a project of realtime improvisational musicmaking, culminating in the formation (at Bard College) of the music-learning program called Music Program Zero, which flourished until 1995. He has written extensively on musical issues, as critic, theorist, and musical philosopher, from the perspective of a practicing composer. His earliest (1970) large-scale music-intellectual essay was the book-length "Meta-Variations, Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought" which addresses the epistemological questions inolved in the cognition and composition of music, and propounds a radically relativistic/individualistic/ontological reconstruction of the music-creative process. Later (1978), his text composition "Language, as a Music, Six marginal Pretexts for Composition" engaged questions of the origin and nature of languageand meaning as they might be conceived from the perspective of music.
His work as composer and writer is available on CDs, DVDs, and printbooks issued by Open Space Publications, a cooperative formed by Boretz with Elaine Barkin and J. K. Randall (www.the-open-space.org). Recent publications include BEING ABOUT MUSIC, a 2-volume anthology of textworks written between 1960 and 2003 by Randall and Boretz; a CD of Boretz's piano music played by Michael Fowler (Open Space CD 18); the 2-CD album OPEN SPACES 2005: MUSIC AROUND BENJAMIN BORETZ (Open Space CD 20, issued in collaboration with Perspectives of New Music); Open Space DVD1, containing the text-music-video pieces Black /Noise III and music / consciousness / gender; and Open Space DVD2, containing video-text-music collaborations by Boretz, Dorota Czerner, and Russell Richardson (GROUP VARIATIONS; POPPIES). POSTLUDE, WITH JIM RANDALL IN MIND, for string quartet (2005) appears in the 2-CD album JKR 3 (Open Space CD 21).
Boretz has taught music departments in a number of American schools, including Brandeis, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton, NYU, University of Michigan, Bard College, Evergreen College, and University of Southampton (UK, as Visiting Fulbright Professor).
Boretz is a co-founder, with Arthur Berger, of the composers' music journal Perspectives of New Music and, in 1999, founded The Open Space Magazine, which he edits with Mary Lee Roberts, Tildy Bayar, and Dorota Czerner. He was music critic for The Nation from 1962-70.
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