Jon Appleton's Incomplete Biography

The following is a revision of my incomplete autobiography which appeared on this website during the last several years. This revision corrects misstatements, chronological errors, exaggerations and outright fabrications. My complete autobiography has been in progress since 1991 and hopefully will be finished by 2009, my 70th year. Two thirds of it is finished and waits revising. One third, the parts about specific musical compositions I have composed are still to be written.

March 2008 Cassis, France

My life has gotten better and better during the seventy years I have lived. Except for one year, I have never stopped composing music since I was six years old. Although I received a great deal of public acclaim for my music in my thirties, I feel that relatively few people know my music. Would it were otherwise. Nevertheless, while I enjoy having others hear my compositions, this is not the reason I compose. Few composers' works have given me as much pleasure as my own - at least at the time of composition. Upon finishing a piece I am usually already thinking of the next.

Aside from music I have been fortunate to have loving children, several very close friends, many enjoyable acquaintances and only a few enemies. Life has passed far too quickly but I would never return to the sadness, depression and loneliness that characterized periods of my life. I have no fear of death except for the excruciating sadness of having to say goodbye to those I love.

My father was born Chaim Eppel Boim in Moldova (1900-1986) but escaped the pogroms with his family and settled in the Jewish ghetto on Ludlow Street on the lower eastside of Manhattan. Self-educated, he became a writer and changed his name to Charles Leonard Appleton. My mother, Helen Florence Jacobs (1907-1975), was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was remarkably beautiful, well read and mercurial.

My parents met at an artist colony near Croton on the Hudson River. They were young, idealistic and consumed with a desire to set the crumbling world of the 1930's on a better track. Most of their friends were writers or visual artists and, like my parents, members of the Communist Party. Most of them were also Jewish.

Unfortunately, like many sincere, would-be saviors of the world, my parents were better at dealing with the plight of humanity than with the daily and less prosaic needs of a family. Soon after their marriage and the birth of my older brother in 1932, they made the long trek across an impoverished America to Los Angeles. They were lucky and found work in the film industry, my mother as a film editor for MGM. She was also Secretary of The Communist Party of Los Angeles. She was proud to have worked on the Oscar winning film the Best Years of Our Lives and Action in the North Atlantic, written by the screenwriter for whom I am named, John Howard Lawson. (See the illuminating biography by Gerald Horn, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten.

My father was a writer for 20th Century Fox. His most notable work - at least the only one I know of - was a story for a script for a movie called Lucky Jordan. There was lots of money those days for writers at the Hollywood studios. My brother Michael Charles Appleton was born in 1932 and was celebrated as a prince with sufficient domestic help to allow our parents their careers and social lives they came to take for granted. The years living in Beverly Hills, however, were not the best years of my parents' lives. Their marriage deteriorated and they drifted apart. My father stopped seeing his close friends from the old leftist circles in New York, used his middle name as his last, and dropped out of sight politically. Since he never really wanted "a family" to begin with, my birth in 1939 only exacerbated the situation. Finally, when my brother tried to hang himself from a stairwell my father left and I only saw him again once or twice when I was eighteen.

For two years my mother tried to cope as a single parent with two children and two jobs. In 1941 she placed me in an orphanage called Mrs. Bell's. My older brother was sent off to Palomar Military Academy where I joined him two years later. My first real memory is standing in a crib looking out the orphanage window into the hot, bright emptiness of the LA cityscape and wondering where my mother was.

Utopian, intellectually focused, self-absorbed parents aren't the most nurturing people in the world. They had a way of making one feel like a burden. My mother, however, seems to have planted some seed in me that makes me champion the underdog and bridle against social injustice. She raised my brother and me to stand on our own and never to count on anybody. We both held jobs since we were ten years old and tended to excel at whatever we took on. But unfortunately we found it difficult trusting other people, especially women. Our mother was alternately angry, sexually seductive or unaware of our existence.

In 1945, when I was six years old my mother married a wonderful Russian musician named Alexander Walden, nee Bomstein (1897-1983). We called him Sasha. He insisted that my brother and I be taken out of the military academy and that we all be reunited as a family. I love him most, however, for opening my door to the world of music. He was quick to observe the effect sound had on me. Even the simplest tune would set me off singing and dancing. When I moved to Sasha's house on Gower Street in Hollywood, he made sure that I had my own radio. Every night I would stretch out in bed and listen to the classical music station KFAC until the station signed off with a playing of Faure's Pavanne. The radio was given to me because I was a head-banger, a behavior I continued until I discovered sex as a way to relieve the fear of abandonment.

My parents knew that I wasn't asleep but thought the music would calm me. Often Sasha would let me to play some of his 78 r.p.m. recordings: Scarlatti, Prokofiev, Russian folk songs, etc. It was at age six that I began to study the piano.

Sasha was born in Ufa, a city in the Ural Mountains of Russia. He fought with the Red Army until the anti-Semitism drove his family to Shanghai where they became part of a thriving Russian/Jewish community. He continued to study violin at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In 1925 they immigrated to New York City. While he always thought the Soviet Union was the future, I think his loyalty was basically a form of national loyalty for Mother Russia that is deep in the soul of every emigre.

My brother, though a talented artist and jazz bass player, became a physician. For me, however, there was one choice. Sasha was a professional musician so it seemed natural that I would be one too. I dreamed of being either a ballet dancer or a composer. By the age of ten I had written the score and words for a musical comedy called "The Following Lover." I followed this with a long piece for piano called "The Martian Concerto" which sounded like a simpler version of the last movement of the Prokofiev's 3rd Piano Concerto. As a boy I had a beautiful, soprano voice.

Shortly before puberty and the American angst of adolescence, I auditioned for the Columbus Boys' Choir. My parents did not want me to leave Los Angeles. After a year of singing ethereal music, my voice began to change and I became the accompanist for the Thomas Starr King Junior High School boy's glee club. Prior to puberty all of my friends were girls.

During this time I studied piano with two fine musicians, Jacob Gimpel and Theodore Saidenberg. I was a poor student preferring to improvise rather than practice Chopin, Schumann, etc. I was living in a very anxious and despondent home. Sasha was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee and immediately fired from his job in the Universal Studio orchestra. My mother was also blacklisted and found it difficult to find any work in the film industry. One evening--I must have been about thirteen--I ran away from home and hitchhiked across the United States. I went to stay for the summer with my uncle, Walter Walden, a set-designer in New York City.

Free of the anger and remorse of home, I was amazed at how exciting the rest of the world was. Of course it had its ugliness. The horrible demeaning effects of segregation were everywhere. On the whole, however, people were exceptionally generous and kind to me. As I passed through the neat, nameless towns and cities, I wondered if I would ever find a "normal" family that would like me to be their son?

When I returned to Los Angeles my parents were in particularly difficult financial straits and I took several jobs. One was as a stock-boy at Orbach's department store and another printing the Yellow Pages for the Los Angeles Times. In fact, throughout my life, I have never been without a way to support others and myself.

During my high school years I hid my music and music making and became a politician. From the time I was fourteen I led campaigns against rising school bus fares, smog and in school ultimately became the student body president of John Marshall High School.

Of course I continued to compose and play the piano at home and I did not "come out" again as a composer until I went to Reed College. Suddenly it was clear that composing music would be my life. Being the only composer on the campus provided me with limitless student performers who wanted to play my music. Sadly, I had no composition teachers until graduate school and I consider myself largely an autodidact having learned what I needed from listening other composer's works or simply inventing what I needed.

I married Georganna Towne (1939-1996) at twenty and following graduation in 1961we moved to San Francisco where I composed musical comedies with Willard Bain. Our first child, Jennifer, was born that year when I was twenty-two and working at Macy's department store to support my family. We then moved to Sedona, Arizona where I taught music at a small private school called the Verde Valley School. Here I taught piano, conducted the choir and orchestra, gave classes in music history and theory - all of which I had to teach myself.

For the next few years I pursued graduate education in musical composition at the University of Oregon and Columbia University. By the time I was twenty-eight I was teaching at a small, liberal arts college called Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I continued to work there on and off for forty-two years. In 1967 we had a son Jason and my wife, my children and I lived in Norwich, Vermont. It was an ideal situation as I had plenty of time to compose, a family life in a beautiful New England town and I discovered that I was a born teacher and enjoyed doing so all my life.

By this time I had established myself as a "pioneer" in electro-acoustic music. The late 1960s were a perfect time to do so. There was an audience for alternative music and without thinking about it, I came upon a style that was my own and emotionally engaging.

After thirteen years of marriage my wife grew tired of being a wife and moved to Oregon. This was a difficult time for my children and me but we lived in a very supportive community. Shortly thereafter I married again - to a dancer with a drinking problem. That lasted a short time until I left with my children.

The decade of my mid-thirties to mid-forties I traveled and worked in many places including Sweden, the Kingdom of Tonga, Turkey, France, and Russia. I never again lived in California until I was sixty-seven and taught at Stanford University.

Beginning in 1973 I worked with engineers Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones to develop a digital performance instrument that became known as the Synclavier. I spent ten years composing for and performing on this instrument in many cities in the United States and around the world. I also married again and inherited a wonderfully talented stepdaughter when she was eight. She is the composer Molly Thompson, born in 1971. My own children went on to educate and find themselves: my daughter Jennifer became a psychotherapist and the mother of my granddaughter Natasha and my son Jason a successful singer-songwriter known as JJ Appleton. All of my children currently live in New York City.

My third marriage of fifteen years dissolved while I was teaching at Keio University in Japan. My ex-wife is a painter and she has never spoken to me following our divorce in 1996. Perhaps this is because in Tokyo I fell in love with a director at NHK television. This sporadic, long-distance relationship finally came to an end in 1998 when I met a Brazilian man of Japanese lineage. We lived together for nearly four years when his visa expired and he was forced to leave the United States.

Most of the music I composed during my life was electro-acoustic music. It is recorded and is well known by that tiny segment of the listening public that is interested in such music. In 1990 I began to again compose instrumental and choral music: chamber music, solo violin and 'cello pieces, a great deal of piano and two-piano music, children's operas, choral works in several languages, etc. Never having pursued a career in New York City - which seems essential if one is to be known as a composer in the United States - almost none of my instrumental and choral music has been performed in the United States. Instead I have a following in Russia, France and Japan.

This might change someday but at the moment the triumph of capitalism around the world makes art only a commodity for the lowest common denominator and the greatest sales. So it was in ancient Rome. Nevertheless, I am alive today and will continue to do those things in which I believe.

I am a happy man and have most of what I need except for the intimacy of a companion and the company of children. It may be that I am too old to find this but I will never be too old to compose music and enjoy hearing it.