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© 2005-2025 John Bischoff

 

JOHN BISCHOFF (b. 1949) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his development of computer network music. Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman in the early 1970s. He has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 40 years as a composer, performer, and teacher. His performances around the US include NEW MUSIC AMERICA festivals in 1981 and 1989, Roulette and Experimental Intermedia in New York, and Lampo in Chicago to name a few. He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künste in Berlin, STEIM in Amsterdam, and Fylkingen in Stockholm among other places. He is a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers, the world's first computer network band, and co-authored an article on the League's music that appears in Foundations of Computer Music (MIT Press 1985). From 1985 to the present he has performed and recorded with the network band The Hub. In 1999 he received a $25,000 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York in recognition of his music. He was also named a recipient of an Alpert Award/Ucross Residency Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, noted media theorist Douglas Kahn published A Musical Technography of John Bischoff in the Leonardo Music Journal (Vol. 14, MIT Press). Two important retro- spective CD packages documenting computer network music were released in 2007 and 2008: The League of Automatic Music Composers: 1978-1983 (New World Records) and 3-CD set of recordings by The Hub titled Boundary Layer (Tzadik). Recordings of Bischoff's solo work are also available on Lovely Music, 23Five, New World Records, and Artifact Recordings. A solo CD titled Biplicity was released in 2021 about which Julian Cowley wrote "The music reveals an improvisor who has kept his edge, making inventions, building his own continuities...achieving aesthetic coherence through his own persistence and strength of personality." As a member of the Hub, Bischoff was awarded a GigaHertz Prize for lifetime achievement in Electronic Music in 2018 by ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. He was on faculty for many years in the legendary Music Department at Mills College before retiring from teaching in 2020.