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Benjamin Boretz (3 October 1934) is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century American composer and...

Benjamin Boretz (3 October 1934) is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century American composer and music theorist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and studied composition at Brandeis University with Arthur Berger, at the Aspen Music School with Darius Milhaud, at UCLA with Lukas Foss, and at Princeton with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. He was one of the early 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 realtime improvisational musicmaking, 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