Clifton Callender

Clifton Callender is Professor of Composition at Florida State University, teaching composition, music theory, and music programming and computation, and has studied at the University of Chicago, Peabody Conservatory, Tulane University, and King’s College, London. His works, which often draw on mathematics, are recorded on the Capstone, New Ariel, and Navona labels. Recent commissions include Chain Reactions, for the 75th commemoration of Chicago Pile 1 (the first nuclear reactor), Canonic Offerings and Hungarian Jazz, for the Bridges Conference on the Arts and Mathematics, gegenschein, for Piotr Szewczyk’s Violin Futura project, and Reasons to Learne to Sing, for the 50th Anniversary of the College Music Society. A recent composer in residence at Copland House, his music has been recognized by and performed at Third Practice, the Spark Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, SEAMUS, Forecast Music, Composers Inc., Studio 300, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, the International Festival of Electroacoustic Music “Primavera en La Habana,” NACUSA Young Composers Competition, the Northern Arizona University Centennial Composition, the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conferences, the World Harp Congress in Copenhagen and the ppIANISSIMO festival in Bulgaria. Recent works include a focus on the climate crisis, including a setting of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem for the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit, Dear Matafele Peinam, and a new work for solo piano and electronics, Meditations on a Warming Planet. Also active in music theory, Callender has published in Science, Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and Intégral and serves on the editorial boards of Perspectives of New Music and the Journal of Mathematics and Music, for which he served as Co-Editor-in-Chief.

Professor Callender maintains a personal website at: http://myweb.fsu.edu/ccallender