Peter Gena writes with the saddening news that composer Phil Winsor died in January, and he’d only just now heard. In the 1980s in Chicago, Phil, Peter, and I had a truculent, short-lived organization called the Chicago Interarts Ministry. Phil was one of the early Downtown-style electronics composers at the San Francisco Tape Center (participated in the premiere of In C, as I recall), and a writer of books on electronic-music topics. He became a postminimalist, and was featured on New Music American 1982, the Chicago year. Later, after I left Chicago, he got a position at North Texas State University and started making electronic music videos that were quite enchanting. His inveterate cynicism was an admirable model for me as a just-graduated student. We had only been slightly in touch since I left Chicago in ’89, and he’s another of those composers who deserved much more attention than he received. Later photos show him with less hair, but the one at right is just as I remember him, sardonically funny and with a justifiably dim view of the composing world.