Name John Eaton | Role Composer | |
Died December 2, 2015, New York City, New York, United States Books Involvement with Music: New Music Since 1950 Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Similar People Shulamit Ran, Donald Erb, Bill Smith, Harvey Sollberger, eighth blackbird | ||
John eaton composer benjamin button opera 2010
John Charles Eaton (March 30, 1935 – December 2, 2015) was an American composer.
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Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Eaton attended Princeton University, where he graduated in 1957 (Morgan 2001). He later lived in Rome (1957–68), returning to Princeton to earn a Ph.D. in 1970 (Anon. & n.d.(c)). He subsequently held faculty appointments at Indiana University (1970–92) and the University of Chicago (1989–99) (Morgan 2001; Anon. & n.d.(b)).
Eaton was a prominent composer of microtonal music, and worked with Paul Ketoff and Robert Moog during the 1960s in developing several types of synthesizer (Chadabe 1967; Frankenstein 1968). Notably, he was involved in the development, use, and ultimately unsuccessful commercialization of the syn-ket (Crab 2015). He devised a compositional genre called pocket opera, operas scored for a small cast of vocalists and a chamber group, and composed such pocket opera works as Peer Gynt, Let's Get This Show on the Road, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Tommasini 2010; Grimes 2015).
His operas include 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. 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 1992a). 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 (Rockwell 1985; Morgan 1985a), and subsequently performed in the autumn of 1986 at the Indiana University School of Music (Anon. 2010).
During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Eaton concentrated on works for smaller ensembles, including chamber operas that involved dramatic participation of the instrumentalists alongside the singers (Oestreich 2000). He founded and directed The Pocket Opera Players, a professional troupe dedicated to the performance of his works in this genre, and occasionally those of fellow composers interested in the form. He continued to lead the Pocket Opera Players in New York City, after his retirement from Chicago in 2001. He was a recipient of the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship (Morgan 2001), and a MacArthur Fellowship (Anon. 2008).
Eaton died on December 2, 2015, following a brain hemorrhage. His wife Nelda Nelson-Eaton and two children, Estela and Julian, survive him (Grimes 2015).