His father Charles Leonard Appleton (Chaim Epelboim), wasborn in Chisinäu, Bessarabia. His earliest compositions in the medium, e.g. "Chef d'Oeuvre" and "Newark Airport Rock" (1967) attracted attention because they established a new tra- dition somehave called programmatic electronic music. In 1970 he won Guggenheim, Fulbright and American-Scandinavian Foundation fellowships. When he was twenty-eight years old he joined the faculty of Dartmouth College where he established one of the first electronic music studios in the United States. He remained there intermittently for forty-two years. In the mid- 1970s he left Dartmouth to briefly become the head of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm, Sweden. In the late 1970s, together with Sydney Alonsoand Cameron Jones he helped develop the first commercial digital synthesizer called the Synclavier. For a decade he toured around the United States and Europe performing the compositions eh composed for this instrument. In the early 1990s he helped found the Theremin Center for Electronic Music at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. He has also taught at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, CCRMA at Stanford University and the University of California Santa Cruz. In his later years he has de- voted most of his time to the composition ofinstrumental and choral music in a qua- si-Romantic vein which has largely been performed only in France, Russia and Japan.