Clifton Callender

Welcome to my little corner of the web. I am an Associate Professor of Composition in the College of Music at Florida State University as well as an Associate Editor for Perspectives of New Music.

I'm active as a both a composer and a theorist. Have a listen to (and a look at) some of my compositions. Recent highlights include:

Metamorphoses II, commissioned by the Florida State Music Teachers Association and the Hanna-Yang duo, premiered at the FSMTA 2009 Conference by Emily Hanna Crane and Hui-Ting Yang.
Patty, My Dear recorded by pianist Jeri-Mae Astolfi on Sonance: New Music for Piano.
Point and Line to Plane will be recorded by pianist Jeffrey Jacob and has been performed by Hui-Ting Yang at the 2008 SCI and CMS National Conferences and Chung-Ha Kim at the Western Illinois University 2008 New Music Festival.
Metamophoses performed by Evan Jones at the 2007 Electronic Music Midwest and Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival and the 2008 Spark Festival. Accepted for the 2008 Primavera en la Habana festival in Cuba, but unable to attend due to the restrictions on travel imposed by the U.S. government.

Or have a look at some of my research. The recent highlights mostly involve collaborations (something music academics should do more often, in my opinion):

A three-way collaboration with Ian Quinn and Dmitri Tymoczko on geometrical music theory, published in Science and the topic of a special session at the recent 2007 Society for Music Theory Annual Conference.
An extension of Ian Quinn's recent dissertation into continuous harmonic spaces forthcoming in the Journal of Music Theory. OK, this isn't really a collaboration, but it was Quinn's work that inspired me to pursue something I otherwise wouldn't have touched.
Joint work with mathematician Rachel Hall on Z-related chords (known to the world outside of music theory as homometric sets) presented at the 2008 SMT National Conference.
Empirical research with my FSU colleague Nancy Rogers on the judgments of distance between trichords that answers some of the questions I posed in a separate paper on voice-leading distance.

Oh, yes, I also have a personal life! If you're interested, I've got pictures of my two boys, rising second grader William and two-year-old Ethan.

Clifton Callender
Associate Professor
College of Music
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306