Charles Dodge

Charles Dodge was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1942. He studied composition at the University of Iowa, earning a B.A. in 1964, before moving to New York to pursue graduate work at Columbia University. There he trained under leading composers of the postwar era and completed his M.A. in 1966 and D.M.A. in 1970. During this period he became closely involved with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he was introduced to electronic composition, and at Princeton University he worked with Godfrey Winham, whose guidance led him decisively toward computer music. Beyond his university studies, Dodge conducted research at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and the University of California, San Diego. He later taught composition and computer music at Columbia and Princeton, and in 1978 was appointed professor of composition at Brooklyn College, where he established the studios as an official Center for Computer Music and directed it.

Dodge emerged as one of the first composers to treat the computer as a primary instrument for composition. His work showed that computers could extend traditional composition into areas of analysis, synthesis, and transformation that had not been possible before. He also released LPs of computer music on Nonesuch in 1970, including Earth’s Magnetic Field and the album Computer Music featuring “Changes,” which helped circulate this work beyond specialist circles. Distinctively, Dodge emphasized narrative, language, and human presence within computer sound. He was particularly drawn to the musical potential of the human voice, both spoken and sung, and to the idea that non-musical information such as scientific data, recorded language, and literature could serve as material for composition.

These interests defined Dodge’s most influential works. Earth’s Magnetic Field in 1970 transformed scientific measurements into sound, creating one of the first large-scale examples of sonification. In Speech Songs in the early 1970s and The Story of Our Lives in 1974, he reshaped recorded speech into music, exploring the line between spoken language and song. Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental in 1980 set a live pianist against a digitally reconstructed recording of Enrico Caruso, producing a performance at once humorous and uncanny. With The Waves in 1984, he drew on Joan La Barbara’s voice and Virginia Woolf’s prose to build shifting textures that mirrored the rhythm of the sea. Dodge worked at the edge of computing technology, employing IBM mainframes, custom-built digital-to-analog converters at Columbia’s Nevis Labs, and early speech-synthesis systems at Bell Labs. His music combined technical rigor with expressive clarity, most striking in Any Resemblance. He also wrote for instruments and tape in works such as Extensions for trumpet and Viola Elegy, composed in memory of Morton Feldman, demonstrating how traditional performance and electronic experiment could move forward together in his practice.

Dodge’s contributions were widely recognized during his career. He received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music was commissioned by the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, the Arts Council of Great Britain, Swedish National Radio, Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the MIT Experimental Music Studio. In addition to composing, he co-authored with Thomas A. Jerse the widely used textbook Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance, first published in 1985. As director of the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College, he secured substantial grants and established international workshops and residencies that brought leading composers from around the world. His legacy also extends into the archive, with the Charles Dodge Papers preserved at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, documenting the formative years of computer music.