John Eaton (composer)

John Charles Eaton (March 30, 1935 – December 2, 2015) was an American composer.

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Eaton attended Princeton University, where he graduated in 1957 (Morgan 2001). He later lived in Rome (1957–68), returning to Princeton to earn a Ph.D. in 1970 (Anon. n.d.(c)). He subsequently held faculty appointments at Indiana University (1970–92) and the University of Chicago (1989–99) (Morgan 2001; Anon. n.d.(b)).

Eaton was a prominent composer of microtonal music, and worked with Paul Ketoff and Robert Moog during the 1960s in developing several types of synthesizer (Chadabe 1967; Frankenstein 1968). Notably, he was involved in the development, use, and ultimately unsuccessful commercialization of the syn-ket (Crab 2015). He devised a compositional genre called pocket opera, operas scored for a small cast of vocalists and a chamber group, and composed such pocket opera works as Peer Gynt, Let's Get This Show on the Road, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Tommasini 2010; Grimes 2015).

His operas include The Cry of Clytaemnestra (1980), a re-telling of some of the events surrounding the Trojan War from the perspective of Agamemnon's wife Clytaemnestra, which has been hailed as the first feminist opera. It was premièred in Bloomington, at the Indiana University Opera Theater, on 1 March 1980, and received a number of subsequent productions, most notably in New York and California (Morgan 1992a). Eaton's opera, The Tempest, with a libretto by Andrew Porter after William Shakespeare, was premièred at the Santa Fe Opera on 27 July 1985 (Rockwell 1985; Morgan 1985a), and subsequently performed in the autumn of 1986 at the Indiana University School of Music (Anon. 2010).

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