Lawton Hall is a Milwaukee-based composer and researcher whose creative practice includes chamber music, multimedia and visual works, and electronic music. Inspired by music history as well as his research on musical algorithms, social agency, and sonic perception, his works explore rhythm, harmony, and timbre with a focus on the intersubjective dimensions of music. Recent projects include works for 5th House Ensemble, Hypercube, Khemia Ensemble, DanceWorks Milwaukee, cellist Ashley Walters, and percussionist Abby Fisher. He has created works for the the New Amsterdam Composers Lab, the So Percussion Summer Institute, the Ensemble Dal Niente Summer Residency for New Music, and Nief-Norf, and has been a resident artist at the Wormfarm Institute and STEIM Amsterdam. He has presented research at the International Conference on Live Coding, the IEEE Visualization Arts Program, and the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium.
Lawton studied privately with Ben Johnston and earned the Bachelor’s degree in music theory and composition from Lawrence University, where his mentors included Asha Srinivasan and Joanne Metcalf. He spent two summers working with Pauline Oliveros at the Deep Listening Institute in upstate New York and helped Oliveros publish her books Sounding the Margins and Anthology of Text Scores. He was a Distinguished Graduate Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he earned masters degrees in music composition and musicology under the tutelage of Phillip Sink and Gillian Rodger. Lawton teaches music theory and composition at UWM and co-owns Meltwater Studios, an interdisciplinary artist space in Milwaukee’s Harbor District.
He lives on the south side of Milwaukee with his wife Maggie and their greyhound Kiwi.
Photo by Lucas Fitzpatrick