John Chowning, godfather of digital pop: ‘My wife told me: I didn’t think I’d have to compete with a computer’
Both composer and programmer, Chowning invented the way modern synths work and changed the sound of music for ever. Aged 90, he explains why he’s still at it
For 90 years, John Chowning has lived in constant motion. From his youth as a globetrotting music savant through a heyday of radical computing that revolutionised pop, the composer and programmer has taken scarcely a moment to buffer. And so it is when I video call his home in Palo Alto, California: he’s been tinkering with a musical composition, snuggled on a sofa in a hoodie. “I’m working all the time,” he says with an affable smile. “But I love my work, so it’s healthy.”
His assignment today is to resurrect Voices, a 2005 piece he will perform with his wife, Maureen, alongside a lecture at this week’s No Bounds festival in Sheffield. Chowning’s hearing and vision may be waning but, he says, “artists don’t retire. They create their art until they can’t.”
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