Jon Appleton

Contes de la Mémoire looks back over thirty years of electroacoustic music by Jon Appleton, from Georganna’s Fancy, made at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1966, to two pieces from 1996. Appleton describes two of his approaches here: the abstract handling of timbre and the use of “found musics” and recognisable sound objects. His decade of live work on the Synclavier, which he helped develop, is left out. The booklet opens with a text by Jean-Claude Risset.

In 1969, stranded by weather at Newark airport, Appleton asked fellow passengers what they thought of the new electronic music and laid their answers over a Moog sequence: Newark Airport Rock. Nearly thirty years later, at the suggestion of Esmé Thompson, he asked the same question in San Francisco for San Francisco Airport Rock. Chef d’œuvre (1967), built on a singing pizza commercial by the Andrews Sisters, became the piece he calls his Boléro, the one most often played. Times Square Times Ten (1969) descends from the street into the subway below 42nd Street, with Edison cylinders among its sources.

CCCP (In Memoriam: Anatoly Kuznetsov) (1969) responds to the writer’s defection to the West, combining voices of Tolstoy, Stalin, Kuznetsov and Radio Moscow with Russian folk music. Dima Dobralsa Domoy celebrates his friendship with the singer Dmitri Pokrovsky. In Medias Res (1978) uses the Dartmouth Digital Synthesizer and ends abruptly, and Homage to Orpheus (1969) was made for a sculpture by Varujan Boghosian.

Born in Los Angeles in 1939, Appleton studied at Reed College, the University of Oregon and Columbia University, and taught at Dartmouth College from 1967. He was a founding member of CIME and SEAMUS, and taught at the Theremin Center of the Moscow Conservatory in 1993. He died in White River Junction, Vermont, in 2022.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9635, 1996.