Asbury Park composer of music including solo, chamber, choral, symphonic, electronic. Writer for the Asbury Park Press; faculty at
Westminster Choir College and TCNJ.

Carlton Joseph Wilkinson, a composer of works in all genre, living in Asbury Park, N.J. with his wife, artist and teacher Lauren Golden, and their two children, Alyssa and Joshua. Carlton serves as vice-president of the nonprofit Black Box of Asbury Park, producing its monthly Music of Invention series, and on the faculty at Westminster Choir College and The College of New Jersey. He teaches private piano and composition and is a columnist and writer for the Asbury Park Press. He has also been published
in Perspectives of New Music. His chamber music has been performed in South Korea, Italy, France and Germany as well as all over the U.S. Cygnus Ensemble, New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, flutist Patti Monson, flutist Elizabeth McNutt, violinist Sabrina Berger, guitarist Stanley Alexandrowiczand soprano Sungji Kim are among those who have premiered his works.

A student of Charles Wuorinen and Robert Moevs, he holds a Ph.D. in composition from Rutgers University. He has also studied in France withPhilippe Manoury and Gilbert Amy and presented work in master classeswith George Crumb, Bernard Rands, Diderik Wagenaar, Roger Reynolds, Nils Vigeland and Gerhard St?bler, among others.

He was a student of Laurence Taylor at Trenton State College. Carlton received a Fellowship 2000 grant from the New Jersey State Arts Council,as well as a grant from Meet the Composer and commissions and awards from the Composers Guild of New Jersey.

Carlton was a participant in the University of North Texas CEMI Summer Institute for computer music in Colorado in 1998, and a participant in June In Buffalo music seminar hosted by the Music Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo in the years 1996, 1999 and 2000. He was a student at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, in 1992.

As a longtime resident of Trenton, N.J., he helped to found the Trenton Avant Garde Inc., an all-volunteer all-arts nonprofit producing cultural events in the city of Trenton. He was the founder and director of TAG's George Antheil Project, which staged several significant performances of work by Antheil, a Trenton-born modernist composer.

I am increasingly concerned with self-definition, presenting myself honestly as a composer and a human being, as opposed to working within a preexisting style. To that end, I have ironically become more extrovert, studying the approaches of composers who are my contemporaries and older,more experimental composers, including (lately) Harry Partch, who once said, "The extent to which an individual can resist being blindly led by tradition is a good measure of his vitality."

I prefer chamber music, with acoustic-level voices and orchestral instruments, but I have used electronics, including prerecorded and interactive computer, found and invented instruments and amplification. My music frequentlyemploys spoken word and the sound of human speech as an important, but not necessarily central, instrumental timbre.

Numbers and Legends -- ~17' (2004)
for 17 musicians, including mostly spoken SATB
soloists, synthesizer solo and marimba/vibraphone solo

Elegy 9/11/06 -- 2-3' (2006)
for two guitars
for Cygnus Ensemble

Three Songs on poems by John Falk -- ~14' (2006)
for soprano and guitar
for Stanley Alexandrowicz and Sungji Kim

Four Slow Movements -- ~20' (2006)
for solo piano

Wedding March -- ~4' (2005)
for solo viola