John Eaton (composer)

John Charles Eaton (March 30, 1935 – December 2, 2015) was an American composer. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Eaton attended Princeton University, where he graduated in 1957. He later lived in Rome (1957–68), returning to Princeton to earn a PhD in 1970. He subsequently held faculty appointments at Indiana University School of Music (1970–92) and the University of Chicago (1989–99). Eaton was a prominent composer of microtonal music, and worked with Paul Ketoff and Robert Moog during the 1960s in developing several types of synthesizer. Notably, he was involved in the development, use, and ultimately unsuccessful commercialization of the SynKet. He devised a compositional genre called pocket opera, operas scored for a small cast of vocalists and a chamber group, and composed such pocket opera works as Peer Gynt, Let’s Get This Show on the Road, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. His operas include The Cry of Clytaemnestra (1980), a re-telling of some of the events surrounding the Trojan War from the perspective of Agamemnon’s wife Clytaemnestra, which has been hailed as the first feminist opera. It was premièred at the Indiana University Bloomington Opera Theater, on Marc