John died Dec. 2, 2015, in New York City, less than six weeks after attending an 80th birthday retrospective concert of his music in New York.
He was born in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and was successful as a pianist and composer from an early age. John majored in music at Princeton and was a member of Cannon Club. He formed a jazz group, the Princetonians, which achieved national recognition for its recordings through Columbia Records. John continued on at Princeton as a graduate student, earning an MFA in music in 1959.
A three-time Rome Prize winner in musical composition, John spent 11 years in Rome at the American Academy. He also was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and a MacArthur fellowship. John explored his own ideas about music in all genres, writing microtonally and for electronic synthesizers, the Synket, and the Moog synthesizer.
He composed more than 20 operas, some of which required reduced numbers of performers, called pocket operas. He taught at Indiana University and at the University of Chicago, and recently lived in New Jersey near Manhattan.
The class offers condolences to his wife, Nelda, and their children, Estela and Julian.