Joseph Dillon Ford

Joseph Dillon Ford (February 6, 1952 – March 8, 2017) was an American composer and author. Life and career Ford was born in Americus, Georgia. He held undergraduate degrees in music and graduate degrees in both musicology and landscape architecture. Although he focused on keyboard performance during his college years, Ford completed his training at Harvard as a Variell Scholar specializing in historical musicology. He studied twentieth-century composers and compositional techniques with Ivan Tcherepnin, the works of Bach and Handel with Christoph Wolff, Dowland and the English lutenists with John Ward, and the music of medieval Aquitaine with David Hughes. His major works include three symphonies, a piano concerto, several harpsichord concertos and sonatas, choral music, and a large quantity of chamber and solo works for the piano and other instruments. Although most of his oeuvre is tonal—often very traditionally so, he also produced non-tonal work using both acoustic and electronic media, and developed synthetic chromatic dialects amenable to both idioms. Keenly interested in emergent music and telecommunications technologies and the rich potential they offer for international cr