Music Department Chair Jon Appleton said he has always been grateful to have been given the ability to compose music and the opportunity to teach students.
Appleton has taught at the College since 1967.
"I've always known that I wanted to teach music," he said.
"I've given my professional life to Dartmouth and to my music and I have loved doing that," Appleton said. "I feel very, very lucky that I have had a wonderful, productive life."
"I feel that I have a very big family of many of the students who I've taught over 30 years," Appleton said.
He said the wonderful thing about teaching at the College is that he has gotten to know and help students -- seeing how their lives develop and encouraging them by letting them know that someone cares about their intellectual development.
Appleton said he feels he has succeeded in making Dartmouth an institution more serious about the arts.
In 1967, he established the Bregman Electroacoustic Music Studio at Dartmouth.
As the director of the graduate program in electroacoustic music, Appleton organizes the annual Dartmouth Music Industry Conference.
During the conference, held at the Minary Center at Squam Lake, music industry executives meet with Dartmouth professors and graduate students studying electroacoustic music to talk about the future development of the field, he said.
Appleton said he enjoys teaching a range of courses for students from beginning music theory to the graduate level.
He is currently teaching a graduate seminar on the influence of technology on musicians and musical instruments in the 20th century.
Appleton will be teaching an introductory music theory course this summer.
Next fall, he will teach a class with Mathematics Lecturer John Finn on the relationship between math and music.
Appleton was born in Hollywood, California in 1939. His mother was a film editor for MGM Studios, and his father was a writer for 20th Century Fox Studios.
"My stepfather, who raised me, was a professional musician," he said. "He was the one responsible for my early musical education."
He started playing the piano and writing music at the age of six.
Appleton received degrees in music from Reed College, the University of Oregon and Columbia University.
He wrote musical comedies in San Francisco after graduating from Reed in 1961. He then taught music at a preparatory school in Arizona.
"I became interested in electroacoustic music as a graduate student at the University of Oregon," Appleton said. "It was a brand new field then in the 1960s."
Best known for his contributions to the field of electro-acoustic music, Appleton is the founding member of both the International Confederation for Electroacoustic Music and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music United States, according to a prepared biography.
He has worked in the fields of electroacoustic music, chamber music, film scores, theatre music, dance music and music for voice, chorus, orchestra, piano, synclavier and other digital performance instruments.
He said he helped develop the synclavier, a digital performance instrument.
Appleton is currently working on an electronic piece that uses computer equipment to transform the voices of singers from the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific.
His recent works include "The Turkina Suite for Two Pianos" and "Our Voyage to America," a piece written for the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble in Moscow.
His music has been performed all over the world. In 1993, he traveled to France where his piece, "Hopi: La naissance du desert," was performed by a French children's choir.
Appleton is fluent in French, Swedish and Tongan, a Polynesian language, and speaks some Spanish, Russian and German.
"The knowledge of other languages and different kinds of music are some of the most important parts of education," he said.
One of the best things about Dartmouth is the language program, Appleton said.
"I took Spanish 1 here with the undergraduates in 1990, because I was planning to work in Cuba," he said. "I wanted to write songs based on Cuban poets."
This fall, he will begin studying Japanese at the College.
Appleton started working on his autobiography, "Struggling to Be Heard: The Autobiography of an American Composer," four years ago, and said he has completed more than half of it.
He said the autobiography will be completed the next time he has a six-month break.
According to his biography, Appleton has published several books and articles on electroacoustic music and the relationship between music and technology.
Appleton has been awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts and American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships, according to his biography.
Besides being a teacher and a composer, he enjoys painting, dancing and cooking.
He is married to Studio Art Department Chair Esme Thompson. They have three children, Jason and Molly, who are musicians, and Jennifer,who is a psychotherapist.
