Charles Dodge – Electronic Music Pioneer 11/15/25
Charles Dodge is recognized as an innovative composer, a distinguished educator and an inventive wine and spirits maker.
He was a pioneering composer of computer music. His music used computers to enrich the range of sounds in music and to extend aspects of the compositional process itself. His Earth’s Magnetic Field (1970) was the first musical example of "Sonification," using a computer to "listen to" a collection of data – in this case data that represented, over the course of a year, the buffeting effect of solar radiation on earth’s magnetic field. The sound pallet he designed for the work evokes a sense of spaciousness and solar radiance. EMF was hailed in the New York Times as one of "10 important works” of the 1970’s. Dodge also made some of the first musical works where the computer sounds embodied synthesized speech. A series of his works from Speech Songs (1972) through The Waves (1984) demonstrate, in musically remarkable ways, the evolving uses of digital signal processing in music.
His compositional work was recognized with grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation and others.
His works were commissioned by, among others, the Fromm Music Foundation, Nonesuch Records, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the M.l.T. Experimental Music Studio, the Bourges Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, Swedish Radio, and the British Arts Council.
As a professor of music he initiated the graduate study of computer music at Columbia University and founded The Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a music professor at Dartmouth College until his retirement in 2009. He is the co-author, with Thomas A. Jerse, of Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition and Performance (Schirmer Books, 1985; 2nd edition, 1996).
In the 1990’s Dodge and his wife Kate began making wines in their basement, using produce grown at local farms and orchards. Leveraging the same attitude toward excellence and attention to detail that Dodge used in exploring his musical ideas, they created a diverse body of wines and spirits. Today their small winery and tasting room in Putney, VT is home to award-winning wines and liqueurs, apple brandy and sparkling apple cider. In 2025, the Dodges retired from the winery and sold their business to their staff, making Putney Mountain Winery a worker-owned entity.
Fittingly, Dodge, electronic-music pioneer, opened the festival with a lecture on his work, along with a few recorded examples of his music. The festival producers consider it an honor and a blessing to have had him participate.
Circuits in the Woods, a festival celebrating Vermont’s role in the invention of the analog synthesizer and the Synclavier, came to downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, on Saturday, November 15, 2025. The all-day festival, founded and co-produced by local radio host and journalist, Wendy M. Levy, featured 25 events on five stages, including performances, lectures, and a "synth petting zoo," from artists of many genres using electronics as their only source or to manipulate acoustic instruments or their voices. Locations were Turn It Up! at 85 Main Street, 118 Elliot at 118 Elliot Street, Tavernier Chocolates at 128 Main Street, Marigold at 157 Main Street, and The Wonky Press at 229 Main Street. The festival was a great success and plans are in the works to do it again in November, 2026. To sign up for the newsletter, contact circuits[at]fastmail[com].
