About

Gene De Lisa is a Classical Music Composer, Author, Educator, Lecturer and Feline Psychic. Even though there are tens of dollars to be made as a classical music composer in the U.S., he instead pays for most of his 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 (C, C++ and Objective-C on a Unix box then a NeXT) and learn digital signal processing.

If you attend Princeton Symphony concerts you may have read my program annotations – or used them to fan yourself during heat spells. I am also that guy who yaks about the music onstage before the concerts.

Perhaps you found me through my computer composition book Computer Music in C – which is amazingly still 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 Java and sometimes Groovy. The key word I just used as “assist”; these days I find algorithmic composition pointless. Those Fractal pieces I wrote in the early 80s seemed to be a cool idea at the time though.

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 Haddonfield, NJ near Philadelphia. This is a perfect geographical location for a classical music lover.

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

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