Benjamin Boretz


Benjamin Aaron Boretz is an American composer and music theorist.

Life and work

Benjamin Boretz was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a degree in music from Brooklyn College in 1954, studied composition with Tadeusz Kassern, and later studied composition at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Irving Fine, with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music Festival and School, with Lukas Foss at UCLA, and with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions at Princeton University. Boretz was one of the first composers to work with computer-synthesized sound. In the late 1970s and 1980s he converged his compositional and pedagogical practices in a project of real-time improvisational music-making, 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 large-scale music-intellectual essay was the book-length "Meta-Variations, Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought," which addresses the epistemological questions involved in the cognition and composition of music, and propounds a radically relativistic/individualistic/ontological reconstruction of the musical creative process. Later, in 1978, his text composition "Language, as a Music, Six marginal Pretexts for Composition" engaged questions of the origin and nature of language and meaning as they might be conceived from the perspective of music.
Boretz has taught in the music departments of a number of American universities, including Brandeis, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Chicago, NYU, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Bard College, UC Santa Barbara, Evergreen College, and University of Southampton.
Boretz is a co-founder, with Arthur Berger, of the composers' music journal Perspectives of New Music and in 1988 founded Open Space and, in 1999, The Open Space magazine, which he edits with Dorota Czerner, Tildy Bayar, Jon Forshee, Dean Rosenthal, and Arthur Margolin. He was principal music critic for The Nation from 1962 to 1970.

Recordings

Boretz's work as composer and writer is available on CDs, DVDs, and print books issued by , a cooperative formed by Boretz with Elaine Barkin and J. K. Randall.

Principal Compositions

Two Holy Sonnets of John Donne
Leda and the Swan for alto voice, 2 cellos, flute
The River Between
Sugar, Free

Books:
Articles published: in journals: The Open Space Magazine; Musical America; Musical Quarterly; Harper's; The Nation; Perspectives of New Music; Journal of Philosophy; Cimaise; the London Magazine; Journal of Music Theory; Contemporary Music Newsletter; Proceedings of the American Society of University Composers; Proceedings of the International Musicological Society; News of Music;
in books: Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory ; Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics.