American composer William Duckworth (b. 1943) is the composer of over 200 pieces of music, and the author of numerous books and articles, including
Virtual Music: How the Web Got Wired for Sound (2005). In the mid 1990's he began Cathedral, a multi-year work of music and art for the web that went on-line June 10th, 1997. Incorporating both acoustic and computer music, live webcasts, and newly created virtual instruments, Cathedral is one of the first interactive works of music and art on the web. It can be found at www.monroestreet.com/Cathedral. The Cathedral Band, a component of the Cathedral project that includes New York pianist "Blue" Gene Tyranny, and Seattle's DJ Tamara and Stuart Dempster, gave its first New York performance on April 1, 2000, live and on the web.
As a composer, Duckworth is considered the founder of Post-minimalism, and his hour-long Time Curve Preludes for piano defines the post-minimal style. Since their 1979 premiere, these preludes have been heard on five continents, including the Spoleto Festival USA, where they were performed during the first live webcast ever given from the festival. The
Village Voice called Duckworth's preludes "likely to be one of the 20th century piano cycles most often performed in the 21st."
Musical America called them "a work of captivating beauty", and described listening to them as "hearing a kaleidoscope."
Duckworth’s
Southern Harmony (1980-81) is a great post-minimalist choral edifice built from the humblest of home-grown American musical materials: “shape note” singing, a style of communal music-making associated with the semi-literate Baptists and Methodists of the rural South. Shape notation, or “fa-sol-la,” supplements traditional musical notation so that even those with no formal training can read simple chorales and “fuguing tunes” at sight; given mastery of a small number of shapes, a singer can move easily from marks on a page to mnemonic syllables and thence to hymn singing. It seems almost inevitable that an American post-minimalist composer, one with deep roots in the South, would find inspiration in the shape-note hymns collected in works such as
The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion (Walker, 1835) and
The Sacred Harp (White, 1844).
As a performer, Duckworth participated in the 1992 Cagemusicircus, a John Cage memorial concert at New York's Symphony Space, playing Cage's
Speech on a short-wave radio, while Laurie Anderson read from the daily papers. He also closed the 18-hour marathon performance of Satie's
Vexations, presented by the New York downtown club Roulette in 1993 to honor the 100-year anniversary of the work.
The New York Times said Duckworth "played with uncanny steadiness and stillness."
Born in North Carolina in 1943, William Duckworth was educated at East Carolina University and the University of Illinois, where he studied composition with microtonal composer Ben Johnston, himself a student of John Cage and Harry Partch. Duckworth is a past recipient of the Walter Hinrichsen Award, endowed by C.F. Peters Corp. (1984), and has held both an NEA Composer Fellowship (1977) and an NEA Collaborative Fellowship (1983). The last was to compose
Simple Songs About Sex and War with Hayden Carruth, winner of the 1997 National Book Award in poetry.
Duckworth currently holds a position at Bucknell University, teaching computer music composition, and a class in 20th-century American music called Jazz, Rock, and the Avant Garde. A 1992
Rolling Stone magazine profile called him a "hip, bright, innovative" teacher who "opens up worlds" students never knew existed.
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