James Dashow

James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival, the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.

A pioneer in the field of computer music, Dashow was one of the founders of the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padova, where he composed the first works of computer music in Italy; he has taught at MIT, Princeton University, the Centro para la Difusion di Musica Contemporanea in Madrid and the Musica Viva Festival in Lisbon; he was invited by the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venezia to teach an intensive series of workshop / master classes in digital sound synthesis techniques applied in particular to compositional practices, and to various aspects of the spatialization of sound. In 2011, Dashow was presented with the distinguished career award “Il CEMAT per la Musica” from the Federazione CEMAT (Roma) for his outstanding contributions to electronic music. He was composer in residence at the 12th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, and he continues to lecture and conduct master classes extensively in the United States and Europe. Dashow served as the first vice president of the International Computer Music Association, and was for many years the producer of the radio program “Il Forum Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea” for Italian National Radio. He has written theoretical and analytical articles for Perspectives of New Music, the Computer Music Journal, La Musica, and Interface; he is the author of the MUSIC30 language for digital sound synthesis, and the Dyad System, a compositional method and technique for developing pitch structures and integrating them in electronic sounds.

His music has been recorded on Ravello, WERGO, Capstone Records, Neuma, RCA-BMG, ProViva, Scarlatti Classica, CRI, BVHAAST and Pan. Recordings in surround sound of the complete set of his Soundings in Pure Duration, multi-channel electronic music with and without soloists, are on DVDs produced by Neuma (vol. 1) and Ravello (vol. 2). Dashow makes his home in the Sabine Hills north of Rome. Further information and downloadable software relative to the composer’s Dyad System and MUSIC30 are available at his website.