James Caldwell is Professor Emeritus at Western Illinois University. At WIU he was co-director of the annual New Music Festival, curator of his own ElectroAcoustic Music Macomb series, recipient of the inaugural Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005, the 2009 Distinguished Faculty Lecturer, president of the WIU chapter of UPI Local 4100, the bargaining unit for about 600 faculty and academic support professionals, and other things.

A native of Michigan, he earned a B.M. degree from Michigan State University and M.M. and D.Mus. from Northwestern University, studying composition with Alan Stout, M. William Karlins, David Liptak, Charles Ruggiero, and Thomas Christian David, and electronic and computer music with Stephen Syverud, Peter Gena, and Gary Kendall. He taught at Northwestern and DePaul University in Chicago before his 33-year career at WIU.

A frequent collaborator with WIU performer colleagues, his compositional interests have been divided between electronic music and music for acoustic instruments and voices. His series of pieces with the title Texturologie, the name of a series of paintings by Dubuffet, explores the creation of intricate continuous-field textures, often through algorithmic processes generated in the software Max. His Pocket Music pieces are a series of concrète miniatures that span about twenty years of his activity. He has explored the potential of performing with alternative controllers for real-time computer music, such as the iPod Touch and the Wii Remote. His solo, chamber, and large ensemble music explores lyricism, rhythmic vitality, idiomatic writing, and expressive plasticity. While his music has been performed at the typical national and international festivals and conferences, he has been dedicated to making music where he is, and programmed hundreds of new pieces by living composers at WIU.

In 2004 he began studying drawing, design, print making, sculpture, and painting at WIU as a way to stretch creatively and to reacquaint himself with the experience of being a student. He earned a BA in Art from WIU in 2014.