Serge Tcherepnin

Serge Tcherepnin (b. 1941, Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris) is the third generation of a Russian composing family — his father was Alexander Tcherepnin, his grandfather Nikolai. He studied under Leon Kirchner and Billy Jim Layton at Harvard from 1958 to 1963, then in Europe from 1966 to 1968 with Pierre Boulez, Herbert Eimert, and Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik’s electronic music studio. Invited by Morton Subotnick, he joined the Rockefeller-funded Intermedia Program at New York University from 1968 to 1970, then followed Subotnick to the newly founded California Institute of the Arts in 1970, where teaching under Subotnick’s direction brought him into contact with Don Buchla’s early modular synthesizers, leading him to design his own system; he founded Serge Modular Music Systems in 1974, building instruments from locations around Los Angeles until the company closed in 1986. In 2018 he became Chief Innovation Officer at Random*Source, the German manufacturer now producing new Serge modules.