Douglas (Harry) Leedy, born March 3rd, 1938 in Portland, Oregon is an American composer. He studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College and at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was in a composition seminar with membership including La Monte Young and Terry Riley. An orchestral hornist, harpsichordist, and singer, he studied South Indian music in Madras with K.V. Narayaswami and was the musical director of the Portland Handel Festival. He taught music at UCLA and at Reed College. He foundeded the electronic music studio at UCLA, and his synthesized music was among the earliest commissioned album-length recordings of the Moog Synthesizer. The double album Entropical Paradise was both the first double album of synthesized music and featured modular analog syntheziser patches that, once set, played without further intervention by the performer. (Excerpts from Entropical Paradise were also included in the soundtrack album to the film Slaughterhouse Five as atmospheric compliments to the music by Bach that had been featured in the actual Glenn Gould-produced soundtrack). Although intially in an atonal, but not strictly serial, style, his music has included theatrical elements (Exhibition Music, Decay), has had deep relationships to early music (Symphoniae Sacrae for soprano, harpsichord, and viola da gamba), and he has explored the relationship, in classical Greek and Latin music betweent text and music. He is a scholar of tuning systems and has composed for keyboard instruments in historical meantone and non-equal temperaments and in various systems of Just intonation. His Pastorale (1987) is a setting of an Ode of Horace for chorus and retuned piano in Just Intonation, four hands. The Smith Campus Center Fountain at Pomona College during the inauguration of David Oxtoby Pomona College is a small private residential liberal arts college located 30 miles (48 km) east of Downtown Los Angeles in Claremont, California. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... La Monte Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer whose eccentric and often hard-to-find works have been included among the most important post World War II avant-garde or experimental music. ... Terry Riley – (Portrait by Betty Freeman) Terry Riley (born 24 June 1935) is an American composer associated with the minimalist school. ... The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university situated in the neighborhood of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ... Reed College is a liberal arts college with 1350 students as of the autumn of 2005 (45% men and 55% women), located in Portland, Oregon in the Eastmoreland neighborhood. ... Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Childrens Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut. ... Glenn Gould, Toronto, 1974 Glenn Herbert Gould (September 25, 1932 – October 4, 1982) was a celebrated Canadian pianist, noted especially for his recordings of Johann Sebastian Bachs keyboard music. ... Meantone temperament is a system of musical tuning. ... In music, just intonation, also called rational intonation, is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by whole number ratios; that is, by positive rational numbers. ... Ode is a form of stately and elaborate lyrical verse. ... Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus, (December 8, 65 BC - November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. ...

Sources

• "Leedy, Douglas" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
• "Leedy, Douglas" in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music & Musicians
• Strange, Allan, Electronic Music (includes the score to Leedy's Entropical Paradise with Birdcall);
• Source: Music of the Avant Garde (includes the score to Leedy's Usable Music I for very small instruments with holes);
• Scores published by Fallen Leaf Press, Schirmer, MaterialPress.Com