John MacCallum is a composer and researcher currently based in France. From 2008–2011 he held a position as Musical Systems Designer at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). While there, he designed a number of software tools including some useful for composing and performing music with multiple, independent, smoothly-varying tempos, which resulted in his composition Aberration (2010) for percussion trio and continues to inform his current work. In addition to his interest in polytemporal music, MacCallum’s compositional work is heavily reliant on technology both as a compositional tool and as an integral aspect of the performance of a piece. His works often employ carefully constrained algorithms that are allowed to evolve differently and yet predictably each time they are performed.
John holds degrees from the University of the Pacific (B.M. in Composition/Theory), McGill University (M.M. in Composition), and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. in Music Composition). In 2007, while working on his doctorate, John was awarded a FACE (French American Cultural Exchange) Fellowship to work at the Centre International de Récherche Musicale (CIRM) and to study composition and electronic music with Michel Pascal at the Conservatoire de Nice and the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis.
