|
Ursula Oppens
Ursula Oppens (born February 2, 1944) is an American classical concert pianist and educator. She has received five Grammy Award nominations. Biography Ursula Oppens was born on February 2, 1944, in New York City into a highly musical family from Jewish parents who had fled Prague in 1938. She obtained a high school diploma from the Brearley School (1961) a Bachelor of Arts degree (cum laude) from Radcliffe College (1965) and an M.S. degree from the Juilliard School (1967). She began early piano studies with her mother Edith Oppens, a noted piano pedagogue, and went on to study with American pianist Leonard Shure. At Juilliard she studied with Rosina Lhévinne and Felix Galimir. In 1969 Oppens won the Gold Medal at the Busoni International Piano Competition and the Young Concert Artists competition, plus an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1976. She served as a Founding Member of the Speculum Musicae from 1971 to 1982. From 1994 until 2008 Oppens was on the summer faculty of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carla Bley
Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg; May 11, 1936) is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera '' Escalator over the Hill'' (released as a triple LP set), as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer, John Scofield and her ex-husband Paul Bley. Early life Bley was born in Oakland, California, United States, to Emil Borg (1899–1990), a piano teacher and church choirmaster, who encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano, and Arline Anderson (1907–1944), who died when Bley was eight years old. After giving up the church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen,Ben Sidran, ''Talking Jazz: An Illustrated Oral History'', Pomegranate Artbooks, 1992 she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alvin Singleton
Alvin Singleton (born December 28, 1940; Brooklyn, New York) is a composer from the United States. Born and raised in New York City, he received his music education from New York University (B.A.), studying with Hall Overton and Charles Wuorinen, and the Yale School of Music (M.M.), studying with Yehudi Wyner and Mel Powell. With Fulbright Scholarships, he studied at the Saint Cecilia Academy in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi. From 1971 to 1985 he lived in Europe, and then he returned to the United States after being appointed as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra resident composer, and served in that position from 1985-1988. He served as a resident artist at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was also a Rockefeller Foundation grantee in a series entitled "Meet the Composer." Singleton's music shows the evidence of a wide range of influences - "from Mahler to Monk, Bird to Bernstein, James Baldwin to Bach, Santana to Prince" - and often incorporates aspects of theatre and surprise. Notabl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Shawn
Allen Evan Shawn (born August 27, 1948)''Vermont, Marriage Records, 1909-2008'' is an American composer, pianist, educator, and author who lives in Vermont. His music Shawn began composing at the age of ten, but dates his mature work from 1977. He has written a dozen orchestral works, including a symphony, two piano concertos, a cello concerto, and a violin concerto; three chamber operas; five piano sonatas and many additional works for piano; and a large catalogue of chamber music, songs and choral music. Among Shawn's available recordings are several of chamber music, four CDs of piano music, including a CD devoted to his piano work by German pianist Julia Bartha, a ''Piano Concerto'' performed by Ursula Oppens with the Albany Symphony Orchestra under the direction of David Alan Miller, and the chamber opera ''The Music Teacher'', with a libretto by his brother, Wallace Shawn. As author Shawn is the author of a book about Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, ''Arnold Schoenberg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Anthony Rzewski ( ; April 13, 1938 – June 26, 2021) was an American composer and pianist, considered to be one of the most important American composer-pianists of his time. His major compositions, which often incorporate social and political themes, include the minimalist ''Coming Together'' and the variation set '' The People United Will Never Be Defeated!'', which has been called "a modern classic". Early life and education Rzewski was born on April 13, 1938, in Westfield, Massachusetts, to parents of Polish and Jewish descent, and raised Catholic. He began playing piano at age 5 and attended Phillips Academy, Harvard, and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy on a Fulbright grant, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship he began a career as a performer of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tobias Picker
Tobias Picker (born July 18, 1954) is an American composer, artistic director, and pianist, noted for his orchestral works ''Old and Lost Rivers'', ''Keys To The City'', and ''The Encantadas'', as well as his operas ''Emmeline'', ''Fantastic Mr. Fox'', ''An American Tragedy'' and ''Awakenings,'' among many other works. Biography 1954–1975: Early years, influences, and education Picker was born in New York City on July 18, 1954, the son of painter and fashion designer Henriette Simon Picker and news-writer Julian Picker, and the cousin of film executive David V. Picker, businessman Harvey Picker, former CEO of The American Film Institute Jean Picker Firstenberg, art-patron Stanley Picker, producer Jimmy Picker, and economist Kenneth Rogoff. At the age of eight, he began composing and studying the piano: Picker started composing in 1962, and, that same year, began corresponding with composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who encouraged his studies. Three years later, Picker was taken ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conlon Nancarrow
Samuel Conlon Nancarrow (; October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was an American- Mexican composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. Nancarrow is best remembered for his ''Studies for Player Piano'', being one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments, realizing their potential to play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation and did not become widely known until the 1980s. Biography Early years Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. He played trumpet in a jazz band in his youth before studying music first in Cincinnati, Ohio, and later in Boston, Massachusetts, with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky. He met Arnold Schoenberg during that composer's brief stay in Boston in 1933. In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco. He was in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Lieberson
Peter Goddard Lieberson (25 October 1946 – 23 April 2011) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. His song cycles include two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: '' Rilke Songs'' and ''Neruda Songs''; the latter won the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and both were written for his wife, the soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. His three piano concertos were each premiered by the pianist Peter Serkin, with the 1st and 3rd also being Pulitzer finalists. Early life Peter Goddard Lieberson was born in New York City. He was the son of ballerina and choreographer Vera Zorina (née Eva Brigitta Hartwig) and Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records. Lieberson studied composition with Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino, and Martin Boykan. After completing his musical studies at Columbia University, he left New York in 1976 for Boulder, Colorado, to continue his studies with Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tania León
Tania León (born May 14, 1943) is a Cuban-born American composer of both large scale and chamber works. She is also renowned as a conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Early years and education She was born Tania Justina León in Havana, Cuba, of mixed French, Spanish, Chinese, African, and Cuban heritage. It was her grandmother who recognized that her granddaughter liked music because of the way she reacted to music on the radio. She began studying the piano at the age of four and she attended Carlos Alfredo Peyrellade Conservatory, where she earned a B.A. in 1963, and the Alejandro García Caturla Conservatory, where she studied piano with Zenaida Manfugás. Leon was one of an estimated 300,000 Cubans who left Cuba as a refugee on the so-called "Freedom Flights". In the spring of 1967 she left Cuba and settled in New York City, continuing her studies at New York University under the tutelage of Ursula Mamlok (B.S., 1971; M.S., 1975). Career In 1969 León bec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Harbison
John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938) is an American composer, known for his symphonies, operas, and large choral works. Life John Harris Harbison was born on December 20, 1938, in Orange, New Jersey, to the historian Elmore Harris Harbison and Janet German Harbison. The Harbisons were a musical family; Elmore had studied composition in his youth and Janet wrote songs. Harbison's sisters Helen and Margaret were musicians as well. He won the prestigious BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards for composition at the age of 16 in 1954. He studied music at Harvard University (BA 1960), where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club, and later at the Berlin Musikhochschule and at Princeton (MFA 1963). He is an Institute Professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former student of Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. His works include several symphonies, string quartets, and concerti for violin, viola, and double bass. He won the Pulitzer Prize for musi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Davis (composer)
Anthony Davis (born February 20, 1951) is an American pianist and composer. He incorporates several styles including jazz, rhythm 'n' blues, gospel, non-Western, African, European classical, Indonesian gamelan, and experimental music. He has played with several groups and is also professor of music at University of California, San Diego. Davis is perhaps best known for his operas; he has been called "the dean of African-American opera composers." His better known compositions include '' X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X'', which was premiered by the New York City Opera in 1986; ''Amistad'', which premiered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997; and '' Wakonda's Dream'', which premiered at Opera Omaha in 2007. His opera '' The Central Park Five'' premiered on June 15, 2019 at the Long Beach Opera Company in California. It won him a Pulitzer Prize for Music on May 4, 2020. Biography Davis was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1951. He has a 1975 degree from Yale University, and ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Corigliano
John Paul Corigliano Jr. (born February 16, 1938) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School. Corigliano is best known for his Symphony No. 1, a response to the AIDS epidemic, and his film score for François Girard's ''The Red Violin'' (1997), which he subsequently adapted as the 2003 Concerto for Violin and Orchestra ("The Red Violin") for Joshua Bell. Biography Before 1964 Corigliano was born in New York City to a musical family. His Italian-American father, John Paul Corigliano Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 23 years. Corigliano's mother, Rose Buzen, was Jewish, and an accomplished educator and pianist. He attended ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
