John Warthen Struble

Who is John Warthen Struble?

John Warthen Struble is an American composer-pianist and writer. Born in 1952 in Washington, D.C, he began piano studies at the age of eight and composed his first work, "The Clown Prince of Wanderlust", a children’s musical theatre piece, when he was 15. That same year, he made his concert debut playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21,K. 467, with original cadenzas, with the San Bernardino Youth Symphony under conductor Gerald Christensen.

As an undergraduate at Indiana University, Struble studied with John Eaton, Bernhard Heiden and Juan Orrego-Salas, in addition to seminars with John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, George Crumb, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Donald Erb and others. His undergraduate thesis was a one-act opera, Pontifex, for theatre-in-the-round with multiple chamber ensembles in lieu of orchestra.

Struble received his M.A. in Music from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Pauline Oliveros and Robert Erickson. His thesis was The “Concord Sonata” of Charles E. Ives: a reference for pianists and scholars, on which he worked with the late John Kirkpatrick at Yale, and which began his lifelong passion for American classical music.