About

Gene De Lisa is a Classical Music Composer, Software Developer, Author, Educator, Lecturer, and Feline Psychic.

Even though there are tens of dollars to be made yearly as a classical music composer in the U.S., I instead pay for most of my cat food bill by developing software.

My name is usually misspelled as “Delisa” since many systems have problems with an obscure character known as a “space.”

I earned a doctorate in composition from the University of North [sic] Texas College of Music. That, along with $0.75, will buy you a soda. That degree’s emphasis was on computer music – which at that time meant you had to learn how to actually program (for me it was C, C++ and Objective-C on a Unix box, then a NeXT) and learn digital signal processing.

I’ve written program annotations for The English Chamber Orchestra, the The Vienna Chamber Orchestra (Das Wiener KammerOrchester), The Zurich Chamber Orchestra (Zürcher Kammerorchester), and the Princeton Symphony Orchestra. For many years, I delivered the pre-concert lectures onstage before each PSO concert.

Perhaps you found me through my computer composition book Computer Music in C – which is amazingly still available at Amazon. (It went out of print decades ago – along with the royalties). I’m sorry but I don’t remember a word of what I wrote. I still write software to assist myself in composition. These days its mostly in Swift, C++, and Java. The key word I just used as “assist”; these days I find algorithmic composition unsatisfying. Those Fractal pieces I wrote in the early 80s seemed to be a cool idea at the time though. So why do I still do it? My cats like it.

One of my computer music (Csound, cmix) works is also amazingly still at Amazon on the CD Composers in the Computer Age 2: CDCM Computer Music Series, Vol. 16. Computer music doesn’t really age well. Take a look at Toy Story I and compare that with what CGI looks like today…

I live in very nice old and walkable town – Haddonfield, NJ. It’s very near Philadelphia. This is a perfect geographical location for a classical music lover and for many other things too!

You can send email to gene@genedelisa.com and I will actually reply.