Jim Horton

Pioneering electronic musician and radical intellectual based in the Bay Area. Horton was an improvising flutist and analog synthesizer player who had earlier worked building large, self-modifying analog synthesizer patches, sometimes interconnecting his synthesizer with those of his friends, building the largest, most complex patch possible and letting it play for eight hours in all-night concerts. He studied at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in the early1970s with Robert Ashley, and performed extensively with non-keyboard analog synths in the mid-70s. From 1976 until his death in 1998 he created a body of interactive algorithmic real-time computer music. He was a co-founder of the League of Automatic Music Composers, a member of RotaLeague, and a founding member of the Just Intonation Network and of the Cactus Needle Project. In 1995 he compiled a documentary history of contemporary and avant-garde music practice in northern California. b. Sept. 6, 1944 in Minnesota. d. 1998