Carlton Gamer

Carlton Gamer (b. 13 Feb 1929, Chicago) is an American composer and music theorist notable for his research in microtonality, non-twelve-tone equal-tempered systems, and early contributions to diatonic set theory. He's a Professor Emeritus in Music at Colorado College and has previously taught at Princeton University and The University Of Michigan. Gamer grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and began to play piano at eight. In 1950, he received a B.Mus. degree from Northwestern University. Carlton further studied composition with Gardner Read and musicology with Karl Geiringer at Boston University, earning his Master's in music in 1951. In New York City, from 1951 to 1953, Gamer founded a workshop of performing composers, dubbed "The Seven," who met regularly at his home, including Sheldon Harnick (violin), Robert Dorough (recorder, flute, and piano), and Erich Katz (recorder). In 1954, Gamer joined the music faculty at Colorado College. After more private studies in composition with Roger Sessions in Princeton, he was invited as a fellow at the Princeton Seminars in Advanced Musical Studies in 1959–60. Carlton was also an Asia Society Fellow at the University of California and Kyoto, Japan, from 1962 to '63. In 1974, Carlton Gamer was a Visiting Lecturer in Music at Princeton University, returning as a Visiting Professor in 1976 and '81. He became a Senior Fellow at the Princeton Council of Humanities and was a Fellow at The MacDowell Colony in 1976. Gamer composed over seventy works in various genres: songs and choral pieces, music for dance, solo piano, chamber, orchestral and computer music. His compositions have been performed at New York's Carnegie Recital Hall, John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts in Washington, DC, Los Angeles County Museum Of Art and numerous other venues in the United States, Australia, Spain, Austria, Italy, Poland, UK, and India. As a music theorist, Gamer introduced innovative concepts of "deep scales" and "difference sets" in equal-tempered systems with more or less than 12 tones per octave. He explored the relationship between geometrical duality and musical inversion and studied invariance matrices in composition. Carlton published articles on numerous other topics, such as trichords and hexachords or musical metatheory.