My father, Emmanuel Ghent, would be 100 years young today. Happy heavenly Birthday Pops!

I’ve been thinking of my dad a lot over the past several months leading up to this day, May 15, 2025, talking to him, reading his works, listening to his music, looking at concert programs and reviews from the 60s and 70s, and wondering what he would make of the world today. After a friend texted me from the MacDowell Colony after finding my father’s music there in February – my dad did a residency at MacDowell exactly 60 years ago this year – I started to feel he wanted to speak with me. And perhaps I wanted to speak with him! I remembered an interview we did in 1988, which I transcribed many years ago. Although my dad passed away in 2003, I haven’t felt ready to listen to that interview again. This week, in his honor, just before his 100th birthday, I took a deep breath and opened up the interview in ProTools after all these long years.

Hearing my father’s voice for the first time in decades, his phrases, the cadence of his speech, when his voice softened or when it brightened, hearing again the slight Canadian accent that he still had even in 1988 when we did the interview, brought tears to my eyes, warmth to my heart and a knowingness that he is still here somehow, somewhere, even if just in my memory and on this recording that we made almost 40 years ago. They say people live on in those who love them, it must be true because today I feel his presence today more strongly than ever before.

The interview is about an hour long, and Dad is speaking about many of the pieces of electronic music he composed in the 1960s and 1970s, his collaborations with Bob Moog, Max Matthews, Mimi Garrard and James Seawright, explaining his fascination with multi-tempi music and how he invented what he called the “coordinome” and the “polynome” to synchronize musicians playing in different tempi.

Listening it’s as if he is here again, sitting in the chair, talking so and jumping up to open up the coordinome, pointing out parts of his pieces that illustrated the points he was making in the interview. At the same time, to hear my young self asking questions in a voice I barely recognize as my own, make me laugh aloud. I was hoping to finish listening to the whole interview before today, but then I found myself not wanting to finish….and instead it feels fitting to keep listening now, on what would be his 100th birthday. So I’m going to stop writing now and go back to 1988 and listen some more to his voice. Thank you Dad for everything you instilled in me and so generously gave to so many others, your creativity and innovations, your clarity and deep wisdom, your utter irreverence and love of word play, your clarity, your curiousity and inventiveness, your constant exploration of new ways of being, letting go of dogma of all kinds in search of new approaches to music, psychoanalysis, composition, computer programming, woodworking, your devotion to new ideas, new music, new discoveries, and most of all your love, resonate more deeply than ever before. I love you. Happy 100th birthday

More articles on Emmanuel Ghent:

Bell Labs, GROOVE & Electronic Music – An Interview with Emmanuel Ghent

Emmanuel Ghent & Ornette Coleman: Man on the Moon

“I’m Calling” by Emmanuel Ghent – Performed by Valerie Ghent & Tri Nguyen

Listen to Emmanuel Ghent Songs for Children and All Their Friends