Biography
Dmitri Tymoczko was born in 1969 in Northampton, Massachusetts. He studied music and philosophy at Harvard University, and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to do graduate work in philosophy at Oxford University. He received his Ph.D in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an Associate Professor at Princeton, where he has taught composition and music theory since 2002. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Elisabeth Camp, who teaches philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and their son Lukas, who was born in 2008.
Photo credit: Peter Murphy
Dmitri's music has won numerous prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Hugh F. MacColl Prizes from Harvard University, and the Eisner and DeLorenzo prizes from the University of California Berkeley. He has received fellowships from Tanglewood, the Ernest Bloch festival, the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory, and was the composer-in-residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was awarded a Bicentennial Preceptorship from Princeton, and has been the Block lecturer at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His book A Geometry of Music is published by Oxford University Press, and his jazz/funk/classical album Beat Therapy is available from Bridge Records. He is currently working on an album of more recognizably "classical" music for strings and piano.
In addition to composing concert music, Dmitri enjoys playing rock and jazz and writing words. His articles have appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly, the Atlantic Monthly, Berfrois, Boston Review, Civilization, Integral, Journal of Music Theory, Lingua Franca, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Science, Seed, and Transition. His article "The Geometry of Musical Chords" was the first music-theory article published in the 130-year history of Science magazine. He has been invited to speak to audiences of musicians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and the general public; articles about his work have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including Time, Nature, and Physics Today.
