William Duckworth

Composer William Duckworth carried the maverick tradition exemplified by composers such as <a href="spotify:artist:73s17iW5LTtXRMVoofi9sU">Charles Ives</a>, <a href="spotify:artist:1Z3fF5lZdCM0ZHugkGoH8s">John Cage</a>, and <a href="spotify:artist:1iNl8IPt07m90D9KU31GrK">Harry Partch</a> through the late 20th century and into the 21st. Becoming known as a pioneer of post-minimalism, he extended <a href="spotify:artist:1Z3fF5lZdCM0ZHugkGoH8s">Cage</a>'s experiments and was a pioneer in Internet-based composition.

Duckworth was born in Morgantown, North Carolina, on January 13, 1943. He attended East Carolina University in Greenville, earning a bachelor's degree, and went on for a master's and doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studying composition with <a href="spotify:artist:075OzURxftv1bWToNH91E5">Ben Johnston</a>, a student of both <a href="spotify:artist:1Z3fF5lZdCM0ZHugkGoH8s">Cage</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:1iNl8IPt07m90D9KU31GrK">Partch</a>. He wrote his PhD dissertation on <a href="spotify:artist:1Z3fF5lZdCM0ZHugkGoH8s">Cage</a>'s use of musical notation. In 1977, Duckworth joined the faculty of Bucknell University, where he remained until his retirement in 2011. Among his students there was Martin Rubeo of the rock band <a href="spotify:artist:7HIIFsnIkTQyYA67bjuhZK">Gramsci Melodic</a>. In addition to composing, Duckworth was the author of five books, mostly on contemporary music, and the editor of two more.

One of Duckworth's early works that gained widespread attention was the set of 24 Time Curve Preludes of 1977-1978, composed thanks to a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and often recognized as the first pieces to embody post-minimalist principles. Hewing to minimalist hallmarks such as repetition and simple tonality, the work introduced variable structures as well as references to such sources as folk music, jazz, medieval music, banjo music, the Dies irae chant, and works of <a href="spotify:artist:459INk8vcC0ebEef82WjIK">Erik Satie</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:2zyz0VJqrDXeFDIyrfVXSo">Jerry Lee Lewis</a>. Duckworth's Southern Harmony, a set of 20 songs for double chorus, refers to the choral shape-note-singing tradition of the U.S. South. Many of Duckworth's later works were related to his overarching Cathedral Project, a work containing music and visual art, and centered on five moments in time: the building of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt, the construction of Chartres Cathedral in France, the Ghost Dance movement of Native Americans in the 19th century, the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 in Japan, and the creation of the World Wide Web. Duckworth developed the Cathedral Project with his wife, software designer Nora Farrell, and was described in Duckworth's book Virtual Music: How the World Got Wired for Sound. He extended the project to encompass the distribution of music in a variety of online channels. Duckworth died of pancreatic cancer in West New York, New Jersey, on September 13, 2012. By the early 2020s, about a dozen of his works had been recorded. ~ James Manheim, Rovi