Dashow James

James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival,the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.

A pioneer in the field of computer music, Dashow was one of the founders of the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at the University of Padova, where he composed the first works of computer music in Italy; he has taught at MIT, Princeton University, the Centro para la Difusion di Musica Contemporanea in Madrid and the Musica Viva Festival in Lisbon; he was invited by the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venezia to teach an intensive series of workshop/masterclasses in digital sound synthesis techniques applied in particular to compositional practices, and to various aspects of the spatialization of sound.

In 2011, Dashow was presented with the distinguished career award "Il CEMAT per la Musica" from the Federazione CEMAT (Roma) for his outstanding contributions to electronic music.

He was composer in residence at the 12th Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival, and he continues to lecture and conduct master-classes extensively in the U.S. and Europe. Recent engagements have taken him to Cracow, Den Haag, Cosenza, Trento, New York, Rutgers University, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Chicago, Boston, Universities of Iowa and Maryland, and Washington D.C.

Dashow served as the first vice-president of the International Computer Music Association, and was for many years the producer of the radio program "Il Forum Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea" for Italian National Radio. He has written theoretical and analytical articles for Perspectives of New Music, the Computer Music Journal, La Musica, and Interface, and is the author of the MUSIC30 language for digital sound synthesis. He was the subject of an extended interview published in the Computer Music Journal (Summer, 2003). His music has been recorded on WERGO (Mainz), Capstone Records (New York), Neuma (Boston), RCA-BMG (Roma), ProViva (Munich), Scarlatti Classica (Roma), CRI (New York), BVHAAST (Amsterdam) and Pan (Roma).

Dashow makes his home in the Sabine Hills north of Rome.