Charles Ames
Charles Ames (1955) graduated from Pomona College in 1977 with a double major in mathematics and music. His teachers at Pomona included Karl Kohn and John Steele Ritter. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where his primary professors were Lejaren Hiller and Morton Feldman. As a graduate student he organized courses in digital sound synthesis and computer composition. Other educational experiences include a 1972 summer jazz workshop at the Berkee College of Music, a 1976 summer workshop in computer-generated sound at Stanford University, a 1976 semester abroad at Oxford University (studying Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music), and a 1978 workshop in computer-generated sound at M.I.T. During the spring and summer of 1977 he worked with Prentiss Knowlton’s computer-controlled pipe organ in Pasadena, California. In 1984–1985 he was part of the SUNY, Buffalo team organized by Lejaren Hiller to create an installation demonstrating Artificial Intelligence and Musical Composition for the 1985 International Exhibition at Tsukuba, Japan. In 1987 Ray Kurzweil invited him to create a new installation for the traveling exhibition Robots and Beyond: The Age of Intelligent Machines. Kurzweil christened this system the Cybernetic Composer. In 1989/1990 he taught introductory theory and computer composition for one year to undergraduates at the New England Conservatory (under the supervision of Lyle Davidson). In 1990/1991 he taught computer composition to graduate students at the SUNY, Buffalo (under the supervision of David Felder). His history of computer composition in Leonardo, Automated Composition in Retrospect: 1956–1986 received Leonardo’s Coler-Maxwell award for excellence. During a long hiatus from computer music he worked as a database programmer, mostly for one company which was variously named UCA, UCA&L, Softback Services Group, ClientLogic, and Sitel. His accomplishments there included designing and building a reporting production scheduler which ran some 14,000 jobs each day. In 2011 Petr Kotík invited him to present at the Ostrava Days Institute.
