Dana Dimitri Richardson, born in 1953, is a composer and music theorist whose work has been dedicated to propelling the classical music tradition forward while avoiding on the one hand, the sterility of modernism, and the nostalgic eclecticism of post-modernism, on the other. His study of species counterpoint, canon, fugue and classical forms with Constant Vauclain at the University of Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1976, formed the basis of his compositional technique. Upon the completion of his tonal studies, Vauclain offered him the prospect of developing a contemporaneous style by means of biscalarity, a system Vauclain had formulated in the early 1960s in an attempt to find a way out of the compositional dead ends of the 20th century.