John Eaton (composer)

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John Eaton, (born 30 March 1935 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) is an American composer.

Eaton is a prominent composer of microtonal music, and worked with Paul Ketoff and Robert Moog during the 1960s in developing several types of synthesizers (Chadabe 1967; Frankenstein 1968; Morgan 2001). He innovated a compositional genre called pocket opera, operas scored for a small cast of vocalists and a chamber group.[citation needed]

His most famous opera is 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.[citation needed] 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 1992b).

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 (Morgan 1985a; Morgan 1992c; Morgan 2001), and subsequently performed in the autumn of 1986 at the Indiana University School of Music.

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[edit] Sources

  • Chadabe, Joel. 1967. "Concert Piece for Synket and Symphony Orchestra". Electronic Music Review, no.4 (1967): 46.
  • Frankenstein, Alfred. 1968. "Introducing John Eaton and his Pieces for the Syn-ket". Hi Fidelity, 18, no. 7:82.
  • Morgan, Robert P. 1985a. "John Eaton and The Tempest". Musical Times 126 (July): 397–400.
  • Morgan, Robert P. 1985b. "Alchemist". Opera News 1, no. 1:28–31.
  • Morgan, Robert P. 1992a. "Cry of Clytemnestra, The". The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., edited by Stanley Sadie; managing editor, Christina Bashford. London: Macmillan Press. ISBN 0935859926
  • Morgan, Robert P. 1992b. "Danton and Robespierre". The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., edited by Stanley Sadie; managing editor, Christina Bashford. London: Macmillan Press.
  • Morgan, Robert P. 1992c. "Tempest, The (ii)". The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., edited by Stanley Sadie; managing editor, Christina Bashford. London: Macmillan Press.
  • Morgan, Robert P. 2001. "Eaton, John C(harles)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
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