Benjamin Boretz

Life and work[edit]

Benjamin Boretz was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Abraham Jacob Boretz and Leah (Yullis) Boretz. He graduated with a degree in music from Brooklyn College in 1954, studied composition with Tadeusz Kassern, and later studied composition at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger and Irving Fine, with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music Festival and School, with Lukas Foss at UCLA, and with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions at Princeton University. Boretz was one of the first composers to work with computer-synthesized sound (Group Variations II, 1970–72). In the late 1970s and 1980s he converged his compositional and pedagogical practices in a project of real-time improvisational music-making, culminating in the formation at Bard College of the music-learning program called Music Program Zero, which flourished until 1995. He has written extensively on musical issues, as critic, theorist, and musical philosopher, from the perspective of a practicing composer. His earliest (1970) large-scale music-intellectual essay was the book-length "Meta-Variations, Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought," which addresses the epistemological questions involved in the cognition and composition of music, and propounds a radically relativistic/individualistic/ontological reconstruction of the musical creative process. Later, in 1978, his text composition "Language, as a Music, Six marginal Pretexts for Composition" engaged questions of the origin and nature of language and meaning as they might be conceived from the perspective of music.


Boretz has taught in the music departments of a number of American universities, including Brandeis, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Chicago, NYU, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Bard College, UC Santa Barbara, Evergreen College, and University of Southampton (UK, as a visiting Fulbright Professor). See: List of music students by teacher: A to B#Benjamin Boretz.


Boretz is a co-founder, with Arthur Berger, of the composers' music journal Perspectives of New Music^[3] and in 1988 founded (with Elaine Barkin and J. K. Randall) Open Space (publications, recordings, scores) and, in 1999, The Open Space magazine (with Mary Lee A. Roberts), which he edits with Dorota Czerner, Tildy Bayar, Jon Forshee, Dean Rosenthal, and Arthur Margolin. He was principal music critic for The Nation from 1962 to 1970.^[4]


He has two children, Avron and Nina.