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Musical
Acoustics – Dmitri Tymoczko
Title: "Pitch
Proximity, Voice Leading, and Acoustic Consonance"
Dmitri
Tymoczko is a composer and music theorist who teaches at Princeton University. He was born in 1969 in Northampton, Massachusetts. He studied music and philosophy at Harvard University, where his primary
teachers were Milton Babbitt, Leon Kirchner, Bernard Rands, Stanley Cavell,
and Hilary Putnam. In 1992 he
received a Rhodes Scholarship to do graduate work in philosophy at Oxford University, but was kicked out of
the philosophy graduate program two years later. He received a Ph. D. in music composition
from the University of California, Berkeley,
where his teachers included Jorge Liderman, Olly Wilson, David Milnes,
Steve Coleman, Richard Taruskin, and Edmund Campion.
Dmitri’s music has won numerous prizes and awards,
including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, two Hugh F. MacColl Prizes from Harvard
University, and the Eisner and
DeLorenzo prizes from the University
of California, Berkeley.
He has received fellowships from Tanglewood, the Ernest Bloch
festival, the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory, and
has been the composer in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study. He was recently awarded the
Arthur Scribner Bicentennial Preceptorship from Princeton University. His music has been performed and by the
Brentano Quartet, the Pacifica Quartet, Ursula Oppens, the Network for New
Music, the Synergy Vocal Ensemble, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Cleveland
Contemporary Youth Orchestra, and others.
In addition to composing concert music, Dmitri enjoys playing rock
and jazz.
Dmitri’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review,
Civilization, Integral, Lingua Franca, Music Theory Online, Music Theory
Spectrum, and Transition. His recent
article “The Geometry of Musical Chords” was the first music theory article
published by Science in its 127-year history, and was discussed in Time,
Nature, The Washington
Post, The Boston Globe, NPR, Physics Today, and elsewhere. As a result of
this work, he has been invited to speak to audiences of physicists,
musicians, philosophers, mathematicians, and geneticists. He is currently writing a book for Oxford
University Press about what makes music sound good.
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