Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University
Professor
Princeton, New Jersey
dmitri@Princeton.EDU
Office:
(609) 258-4255
Expert In
Bio/Research
I grew up in Western Massachusetts, playing in rock bands and studying a bit of classical piano. In college, I was the last person in history to get a traditional modernist/twelve-tone education, studying composition with Milton Babbitt, Leon Kirchner, and Bernard Rands. This led me to quit m...
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Bio/Research
I grew up in Western Massachusetts, playing in rock bands and studying a bit of classical piano. In college, I was the last person in history to get a traditional modernist/twelve-tone education, studying composition with Milton Babbitt, Leon Kirchner, and Bernard Rands. This led me to quit music for a while. After graduating from college, I received a scholarship to do graduate work in philosophy at Oxford University, but spent most of my time learning to play jazz piano. I was such a bad philosophy student that I was eventually asked to leave the program. (It wasn't that I didn't try: I tried too hard, and wanted too much to do my own, not-very-academic thing.) I spent a few years kicking around Boston, thinking about music, working as a freelance teaching assistant, and doing a little journalism. (My big hit was an essay in the Atlantic Monthly about the philosophical significance of William James's drug use.) In 1997, having failed at everything except music, I entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, where my teachers included Steve Coleman, Olly Wilson, David Wessel, and Edmund Campion.
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