Dexter Morrill

Dexter Morrill was a composer and trumpeter. At nineteen he studied with Dizzy Gillespie at the Lenox School of Jazz, and he completed a doctorate in composition at Cornell in 1970. He taught at Colgate, in Hamilton, New York, from 1969, and in 1972 he set up a computer music studio at the college.

Morrill's studio later ran on Colgate's DEC PDP-10 with software from Stanford, where he worked with John Chowning and Leland Smith. His Studies for Trumpet and Computer date from 1974, and he wrote about trumpet algorithms for computer composition in the first issue of Computer Music Journal (February 1977). Around 1979 and 1980 the studio issued two LPs on Redwood Records, Computer Music from Colgate Vols. I and II, which included his Six Dark Questions and Fantasy Quintet. He wrote Getz Variations for Stan Getz in 1984, and in the 1980s he developed a MIDI trumpet with the engineer Perry Cook.