On March 30, 2019, at Symphony Space in New York, the John Eaton Foundation celebrated Eaton’s legacy by inviting several of his past students to present their compositions — Richard Cameron-Wolfe, Winnie Cheung, Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, Carol Ann Weaver, Marc Satterwhite, Eugene O’Brien, Patricia Morehead, Judith Sainte Croix, and Randolph Peters — and ending the concert with Eaton’s Sor Juana Songs (1998), for soprano and piano, setting poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century Mexican poet recognized as among the great poets of Latin America.

Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson. Photo by Jeremy Tressler.

Kate Maroney, mezzo soprano; Irena Portenko. piano. Photo by Jeremy Tressler.

Sor Juana Song

The Sor Juana Project, available as are many of his CDs through the John Eaton Foundation, is one of John Eaton’s last works.

The immense variety of music in the concert was a perfect salute to Eaton’s remarkably busy musical career with electronics, song, microtonality, and opera. In 1965, he accompanied Miciko Hirayama in singing his composition titled Songs for RPB in 1965 at the American Academy in Rome. It was a special moment because he was accompanying her with one of the very first synthesizers, in this case designed and built by Paul Ketoff, a sound engineer for RCA Italiana, who called it the SynKet (Synthesizer Ketoff). It may indeed have been one of the first synthesizer performances. It was followed by tours in the US, Europe, and Soviet Union. He wrote operas. He formed the Pocket Opera Players in 1993 and, among others, composed Pumped Fiction, a full-length comic opera, premiered in 2007 at Symphony Space in New York.

For further information
johneatonfoundation.org