Sidney Corbett was born in Chicago in 1960, the son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, though he grew up without a religious upbringing. At the end of 1968 the family moved to Los Angeles, California, and from 1974 he began to learn the electric guitar and play in various bands – first blues and rock, later jazz fusion. In 1977, Corbett began writing his first original compositions, short piano pieces in quartal harmony. “For me, the guitar fret-board was a very small universe,” he once said in a SWR feature about his work, “the world is a much larger place.” This realization led him to study music, philosophy and composition at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and then at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in 1989 with a thesis on Edgar Varèse’s “Hyperpris
