Joseph Dillon Ford

Who is Joseph Dillon Ford?

Joseph Dillon Ford is an American composer and author.

He holds undergraduate degrees in music and graduate degrees in both musicology and landscape architecture. Although he focussed on keyboard performance during his college years, Ford completed his training at Harvard as a Variell Scholar specializing in historical musicology. He studied twentieth-century composers and compositional techniques with Ivan Tcherepnin, the works of Bach and Handel with Christoph Wolff, Dowland and the English lutenists with John Ward, and the music of medieval Aquitaine with David Hughes.

His major works include a symphony, a piano concerto, a harpsichord concerto, choral music, and a large quantity of chamber and solo works for the piano and other instruments. Although most of his oeuvre is tonal—often very traditionally so, he has also produced non-tonal work using both acoustic and electronic media, and has developed synthetic chromatic dialects amenable to both idioms.