Joseph Dillon Ford
Encyclopedia
He holds undergraduate degrees in music and graduate degrees in both musicology and landscape architecture. Although he focussed on keyboard performance during his college years, Ford completed his training at Harvard as a Variell Scholar specializing in historical musicology. He studied twentieth-century composers and compositional techniques with Ivan Tcherepnin
Ivan Tcherepnin
Ivan Tcherepnin was an experimental, then later modernist/postmodernist, composer. He was born into a highly musical family, his father and grandfather, Alexander and Nikolai, being distinguished Russian composers, and his mother Ming a well-known pianist...
, the works of Bach
Bạch
Bạch is a Vietnamese surname. The name is transliterated as Bai in Chinese and Baek, in Korean.Bach is the anglicized variation of the surname Bạch.-Notable people with the surname Bạch:* Bạch Liêu...
and Handel
HANDEL
HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....
with Christoph Wolff
Christoph Wolff
Christoph Wolff is a German-born musicologist, presently on the faculty of Harvard University. Born and educated in Germany, Wolff studied organ and historical keyboard instruments, musicology and art history at the Universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and the Music Academy of Freiburg, receiving a...
, Dowland and the English lutenists with John Ward
John Ward
John Ward may refer to:*John Ward , English composer*John Ward , English Gresham Professor of Rhetoric*John Ward , Lord Mayor of London...
, and the music of medieval Aquitaine
Aquitaine
Aquitaine , archaic Guyenne/Guienne , is one of the 27 regions of France, in the south-western part of metropolitan France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain. It comprises the 5 departments of Dordogne, :Lot et Garonne, :Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Landes...
with David Hughes
David Hughes
David Hughes may refer to:*David Hughes , interim president and CEO of Amtrak, 2005–2006*David Hughes , English astronomer specialising in comets*David Hughes , Swedish bass guitarist...
.
Continuously active as a composer, performer, and lecturer during his career as a teacher of the humanities at Miami Dade College and landscape architecture at Florida International University, his major works include a symphony, a piano concerto, a harpsichord concerto, and a large quantity of chamber and solo works for the piano and other instruments. Although most of his oeuvre is tonal—often very traditionally so, he has also produced non-tonal work using both acoustic and electronic media, and has developed synthetic chromatic dialects amenable to both idioms.
In recent years he has published online Orpheus in the Twenty-first Century: Historicism and the Art-Music Renascence (2003), a multimedia e-book on music aesthetics; Chromatic One: A New Technique for Instrumental Speech (2003), a monograph detailing an innovative art form fusing music and spoken language; and numerous articles, poems, and short works of fiction.
Keenly interested in emergent music and telecommunications technologies and the rich potential they offer for international creative collaborations, he also conceived and brought to fruition numerous large-scale projects in which his interdisciplinary artistic background has proven to be an especially useful asset. These include the world’s largest sound sculpture, an ongoing Web-based work that commemorates the monumental “Standing Buddhas of Bamiyan” demolished by the Taliban in 2001; the “Westron Wynde” Project (begun in 2004), for which composers in the US, Canada, and the UK each contributed music for James J. Pellerite (former principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra); the Delian Suites Nos. 1 through 5 (2005–09), each exploring various tonal idioms (No. 4 in cooperation with the Colloque Fou de Basson, Conservatoire Gabriel Fauré, Angoulême); Nu Mu [sic!] Unlimited (2006–09), the world’s first virtual new music festival; and Ye New Music Fayre (2008–09), a seminal event featuring new music composed in traditional tonal and modal styles.
Ford is the founder of the Delian Society
Delian Society
The Delian Society, conceived by American composer Joseph Dillon Ford, was founded on 23 January 2004 as an international community of composers, performers, scholars, recording engineers, music publishers, and amateurs dedicated to the revitalization of the great tonal traditions in art music...
, whose efforts to reinvigorate tonal music have attracted many composers and performers on six continents and have drawn attention to the accomplishments of other outstanding artists through an ongoing annual awards program.
He presently resides in Gainesville, Florida, US.