Frederick A. Fox

After serving in various faculty and foundation posts in the United States, Fox returned to the Indiana University School of Music in 1974 as professor of composition. One of his first undertakings was the founding of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble in 1975–76, with himself as its first director. During his leadership tenure, the New Music Ensemble began to take its place as one of the foremost university ensembles of its kind in the country; it has since toured to cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York City, among others. Fox was appointed chair of the I.U. School of Music composition department in 1981, and lead that department for 13 years, a period during which it gained increasing recognition and became one of the highest-ranked programs in the United States.

Like many young American composers in the 1950s and 1960s, Fox had some experience as a jazz performer and arranger before he took up composing. His music grows principally out of this background, experience, and interest in jazz, in addition to serial techniques, and some informal systematic formations which tend to possess qualities of improvisation. Though he found serialism to be essentially at odds with his creative outlook, his jazz background was to find its echo in several of his characteristic works.

Frederick A. Fox (January 17, 1931 – August 24, 2011) was an American composer and former music educator specializing in contemporary classical music.

Frederick Alfred Fox, Jr. was born January 17, 1931 in Detroit, Michigan. His early musical training in his native Detroit encompassed the saxophone (with Laurence "Larry" Teal) and music theory and arranging (with Ray McConnell). He subsequently studied composition with Ruth Shaw Wylie and received the B.Mus. degree from Wayne State University in 1953. He worked for a year with Ross Lee Finney at the University of Michigan, but took a leave from his studies to tour as a jazz saxophonist (tenor and baritone), a career he gave up in 1956–57 to return to serious composing. Fox then came to Bloomington, Indiana and the Indiana University School of Music (now the Jacobs School of Music), where he studied composition with Bernhard Heiden, and from which he was graduated with the M.Mus. (1957) and D.Mus. (1959).