Charles M. Dodge

Charles M. Dodge gained recognition early in his career for his orchestral and chamber music. He went on to become one of the first composers to realize the vast potential of the computer for broadening the composer's palette. He began his experiments with direct digital synthesis of sound as a graduate student in the late 1960's. His Speech Songs, completed in 1972, startled the new music world with its charming and humorous use of synthetic speech.

Since those early days, Dodge has shown a particular interest in the relationship between the human voice and its computer counterpart. His works have incorporated the sounds of live, recorded and synthesized voices articulating texts by such writers as Mark Strand, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf. He has also composed a series of works combining acoustic instruments with computer sound on tape, including his widely-performed Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental which sets together a computer-synthesized Caruso voice with live piano accompaniment.

He has been honored with an achievement award from the American Academy/ Institute of Arts and Letters, several Composer Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships. His recent commissions include those from the Bourges Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music in France, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's New Music Group, and the American Guild of Organists.