Richard Maxfield

Richard Vance Maxfield (February 2, 1927 – June 27, 1969) was a composer of instrumental, electroacoustic, and electronic music. Born in Seattle, Maxfield studied at Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley (with Roger Sessions) and privately with Ernst Krenek in Los Angeles. A Hertz Prize travel scholarship allowed Maxfield to travel to Europe, where he met Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono. In 1953 he studied at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland. In 1954–55 he studied at Princeton University with Sessions and his pupil Milton Babbitt. A Fulbright Scholarship allowed Maxfield to live in Europe between 1955 and 1957, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno Maderna, lived for a brief period with Hans Werner Henze and met John Cage and David Tudor. In 1958, he attended Cage’s courses at the New School for Social Research (now The New School). In 1959 he taught classes there himself, becoming the first American to teach purely electronic music (as opposed to electroacoustic music based on musique concrète-style recordings with microphones). As a student at University of California and in Europe in the 1950s, he composed instrumental scores in a