Search Results

(Eugene)

(b West Hempstead, NY, April 26, 1956). American music educator, choral arranger, editor, and conductor. He was a member of the American Boychoir (1969–71), and received degrees from St Olaf College (BM 1978), the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (MM 1980), and Michigan State University (DMA 1987). He was on the summer faculty of the American Boychoir School and now serves on the Board of Trustees. He taught at Calvin College (1980–90) before becoming the fourth conductor of the St Olaf Choir and the Harry R. and Thora H. Tosdal Endowed Professor of Music (1990–). Armstrong is the editor for Earthsongs publications and co-editor of the St. Olaf Choir Series. He chronicled the history of the St Olaf Choir in his doctoral dissertation. He is featured on an instructional video for adolescent singers, Body, Mind, Spirit, Voice (2002...

(Phillips) [Todd Mayfield, Ann; Todd, Ann E.]

(b Denver, CO, Aug 26, 1931). American music librarian, editor, and publisher. Daughter of composer Burrill Phillips and Alberta Phillips, and wife of composer Robert Basart, she was raised by her maternal grandparents who named her Ann Todd Mayfield. As Ann E. Todd, she was a child actress featured in more than twenty films such as Intermezzo, All This, and Heaven Too, and Three Daring Daughters. In 1953 she graduated from University of California, Los Angeles in Music History and continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley earning an MLS in 1958 and MA in 1960. She had a distinguished career as reference librarian at the UC Berkeley Music Library from 1960–61 and 1970–90, during which time she founded and edited the library’s newsletter, Cum Notis Variorum, which gained a national audience. It contained news, reviews, and substantial articles, including bibliographies, checklists, and indexes on various topics and sources. Basart also wrote numerous reviews for ...

(b Plainfield, NJ, March 14, 1949). American composer, engraver, author, and editor. Báthory-Kitsz has written under a wide array of aliases, including Kalvos Gesamte, Grey Shadé, D.B. Cowell, Brady Kynans, and Kalvos Zondrios. He is a self-proclaimed humanist and believes strongly in the power of everyday people to create and perform music. He has also advocated for locally-centered performances and has been a tremendous force in the creative life of Vermont, where he has made his home. While Báthory-Kitsz remains a highly prolific composer, penning over one thousand works since the late 1960s, he is also recognized as an important writer, both on music and on other topics, such as computers and Vermont country stores. Báthory-Kitsz’s commitment to the life of music reaches out from his own compositions, which he allows people to download and perform for free, and also to his advocacy for the performance of contemporary music, seen especially in his involvement with several festivals and projects that keep “modern” music in the forefront. He has served on the board, directed, and founded many of these events himself. He was the director and founder of Dashuki Music Theater (...

(b Lorain, OH, Mar 22, 1954). American music librarian, theorist, and editor. She received her undergraduate degree in music theory from Ohio University (BM 1976). While completing studies in music theory at Northwestern University (PhD 1985), she joined the staff of the Northwestern University Music Library (1980–98). Campana was also active in the promotion of contemporary music in Chicago through performances with the ensemble Kapture (1977–86) and by editing the monthly newsletter of New Music Chicago (1982–4). Her study of library science at the University of Chicago (MA 1987) led to her appointment as music public services librarian at Northwestern (1987–98). While at Northwestern, she also held appointments as lecturer (1993–8) and assistant dean for undergraduate studies (1993–4) in the School of Music and acting head of the Music Library (1994–6). In ...

[John Henderson ]

(b Whitehaven, TN, April 8, 1931). American singer-songwriter, producer, publisher, and entrepreneur. He began playing bluegrass while in the military and after his discharge in 1952, played at radio stations in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Boston. While enrolled in Memphis State University (from 1954), he worked nights and weekends at the Eagle’s Nest club. After working briefly for Fernwood Records, he was hired by Sun Records, where he recorded Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, among others. He wrote hits for several of Sun’s artists, including Johnny Cash’s singles “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” and “Guess things happen that way” (both Sun, 1958).

Clement left Sun in 1960 to became a staff producer for RCA in Nashville. In 1963 he moved to Texas, started a publishing company, and produced Dickey Lee’s hit “Patches” (Smash, 1963). After returning to Nashville in 1965, he discovered and produced Charlie Pride and wrote songs for a variety of country artists, including Pride (“Just between you and me,” RCA Victor, ...

(b Port Huron, MI, April 17, 1943). American composer, conductor, educator, and publisher. He received some of his earliest training in the Salvation Army Instrumental Music program, a debt he later repaid as editor of their music publications. He undertook undergraduate studies at Wayne State University (BM 1966) and graduate studies at Michigan State (MM 1970), studying euphonium with Leonard Falcone and conducting with Harry Begian. His composition teachers were F. Maxwell Wood, James Gibb, Jere Hutchinson, and Irwin Fischer. He has over 400 works in his catalog, mostly tonal, many of which take their inspiration from literature. He is widely known for his symphonic band and brass band works, several of which have won major awards: Symphonic Triptych, Collage for Band (ASBDA/Volkwein, 1977, 1979), Mutanza, Symphonic Variants for Euphonium and Band (ABA/Ostwald, 1980, 1984), and Lochinvar (Coup de Vents, France, 1994). His prolific output for young musicians reflects his many years teaching at public school and college levels. He founded and presides over Curnow Music Press, Inc....

(b London, Sept 19, 1930; d London, July 25, 2009). English writer on music. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge. From 1959 to 1967 he was music critic of the New Statesman, and in 1971 he became editor of Tempo. He was particularly concerned with contemporary music: a series of three substantial and searching articles on Messiaen in Score (1954–5) did much to draw that composer’s music to wider attention in Britain; he also contributed important articles to Score on Gerhard and Stravinsky and a penetrating chapter on French music to European Music in the Twentieth Century. Drew’s main study, however, was Kurt Weill: he edited several of his works for publication, reconstructed his Divertimento for Chamber Orchestra (first performed in 1972), and in 1956 embarked on an extended survey of his life and works. He became director of publications at Boosey & Hawkes in ...

(Moragne )

(b New York, NY, Dec 2, 1929; d Augusta, GA, March 10, 2005). American editor and music critic. She completed her studies at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (BA 1952, MA 1954), and taught there concurrently. She was Assistant Music Editor of Hi-Fi Music at Home between 1958 and 1960, and then of High Fidelity, before becoming editor of Musical America, a position she held from 1967 to 1991. She wrote reviews and many features for The New York Times and was a music critic for the New York Post beginning in 1978; she continued to contribute to the latter publication until shortly before her death. Fleming was a record reviewer for American Record Guide between 1958 and 1964 and again beginning in 1992. She also wrote liner notes for various record companies starting in 1960, and she served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees for Composers Recordings, Inc. She was especially knowledgeable about the string repertory and literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. In ...

[Chester W., Jr. ]

(b Fort Worth, TX, Oct 21, 1943; d Nashville, TN, June 19, 2013). American music critic, biographer, and editor. With contemporaries Ed Ward, Martha Hume, Dave Hickey, and Alanna Nash, Flippo helped bring country music criticism to the mainstream press in the 1970s. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Sam Houston State University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. As a freelance journalist and Rolling Stone Contributing Editor, he covered the progressive country music scene in Austin before being named Rolling Stone’s New York Bureau Chief (1974). From 1977 until 1980, he served as Senior Editor for Rolling Stone, using his position to significantly increase the magazine’s coverage of country music. During the 1980s Flippo wrote several book-length studies of country and rock artists, including Hank Williams (1981), the Rolling Stones (1985), and Paul McCartney (...

(b Hellerup, Copenhagen, Aug 11, 1919; d Aug 31, 2000). Danish music antiquarian, writer on music and publisher. He founded the publishing firm known by his name in 1953 when he purchased the Knud Larsen Musikforlag (founded 1906), and added to this an antiquarian business. He studied at the University of Copenhagen (1944–6) and the Royal Danish Conservatory (1948). From 1957 to 1977 he was in charge of the distribution of the publications of the Samfund til Udgivelse af Dansk Musik, active since 1871.

Fog is regarded as the most important Scandinavian music antiquarian. Through the distribution of the Samfund editions the firm represents much 19th- and 20th-century Danish music, including works by J.A.P. Schulz, Niels Gade, Carl Nielsen, Knudåge Riisager and Ib Nørholm. As a writer and musicologist he presented valuable contributions in the field of Danish music history. Fog was co-editor of the ...

(b Croydon, May 2, 1899; d London, May 27, 1953). English publisher and writer on music. He joined the Oxford University Press in 1921 and, after brief periods in the army and as assistant editor of Land and Water, in 1925 founded its London publishing department. A man of great energy and a musician of varied accomplishments as composer, pianist and concert promoter, he was able in the course of 20 years to initiate series of publications of church music, of English songs, and of commentaries (the Musical Pilgrim booklets), and to act as sole publisher for Vaughan Williams, Walton and Rawsthorne. He was also a friend and champion of Warlock, Moeran and Van Dieren. He edited three volumes of critical biographies of major composers, The Heritage of Music, and was himself the author of the first full-length study of Vaughan Williams; he also made substantial revisions to the second edition of Warlock’s study of Delius and translated Leon Vallas's ...

[William J. ]

(b Alexandria, IN, March 28, 1936). American gospel songwriter, performer, producer, and publisher. He grew up on a small farm in Indiana and graduated from Anderson College with a major in English and a minor in music. He went on to receive a master’s degree in guidance and counseling and met his future wife and song-producing partner, Gloria Sickal, while both were teaching high school. Gaither started singing gospel music as a child and in 1956 formed the Bill Gaither Trio with his brother Danny and his sister Mary Ann. He started his own publishing company in 1959. He continued to perform and compose while a teacher at Alexandria High School and in 1961 formed the Gaither Music Company to publish his works. After their marriage in 1962, Gaither and his wife wrote their first major song, “He touched me,” which was a significant hit by 1963. He re-formed the Bill Gaither Trio with Gloria and Danny, and in ...

(Adams)

(b Portland, ME, Jan 27, 1952). American composer, publisher and writer on music. He studied with Tenney and Budd at the California Institute of the Arts (BFA 1972). He is best known as the editor and publisher of Soundings (1971–91), a journal that included scores by many now well-known American avant gardists and experimentalists such as Lou Harrison, Nancarrow and Partch as well as composers of his own generation. Like some of his mentors, Garland has chosen to live outside the academic and commercial musical worlds. He has travelled widely and been strongly influenced by the musics of Mexico and Indonesia. His works are spare but lyrical, often using exotic instrumentation though much of his output is for the piano (he has written a number of works for the pianists Herbert Henck and Aki Takahashi). His most ambitious work is The Conquest of Mexico, a shadow puppet dance-drama. In more recent works, such as ...

(b Treysa, Hesse, July 28, 1948). German pianist, editor and author. He studied in Mannheim, at the Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart and finally at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, where his teachers were Aloys Kontarsky and Wilhelm Hecker. Since the start of his career he has concentrated almost exclusively on 20th-century works, about which he has written and published extensively. From 1980 to 1985 he edited and published the five-volume series of yearbooks Neuland, Ansätze zur Musik der Gegenwart. Henck has given frequent courses at Darmstadt and elsewhere and has made over 40 recordings, including the three sonatas by Boulez, Cage’s Music of Changes, Cheap Imitation and Music for Piano 1–84, three piano cycles by Gurdjieff/de Hartmann, Koechlin’s Les heures persanes, Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I–IX and works by Schoenberg, Ives, Mompou, McGuire and Medek. Since 1984 he has recorded several discs of keyboard improvisations. He has also published many articles and books, including ...

(b New York, NY, 1827/1836; d Jersey City, NJ, April 14, 1916). American music publisher. He established a music store in New York in 1869 and gradually expanded his business to include publishing. He issued popular instrumental and vocal music such as “The Culprit Fay” (...

(b Hillingdon, Sept 9, 1950). English composer, performer and publisher. He studied with Cornelius Cardew (composition) and Patricia Brady (percussion) at the RAM (1967–9). He was a member of the free improvisation group AMM (1967–1971), the Scratch Orchestra (1969–71, for which he designed their first concert, at Hampstead Town Hall on 1 November 1969), the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO) with John White, Hugh Shrapnel and Alec Hill (1969–73), and the Hobbs–White Duo with White (1973–6). He was Director of Music for Drama Centre, London (1973–91) and was appointed as a lecturer at Leicester Polytechnic (later De Montfort University) in 1985. He is currently also Associate Senior Lecturer in Composition at Coventry University. In 1969 he founded the Experimental Music Catalogue, a publisher and distributor of new music scores and recordings.

Hobbs’s Word Pieces (1966–9) use indeterminate text notation (in which musical actions appear in prose) and, similarly to those of other PTO members, his PTO pieces use repetitive processes generated by random procedures (...

(Marc)

(b Cleveland, Aug 28, 1959). American composer, conductor, baritone, and editor. The child of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman studied at the Boston Conservatory, where he received the BM, magna cum laude, in 1981. He earned the MM from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1984, and he received the PhD from Brandeis University in 1993. His teachers included Arthur Berger, Martin Boykan, Hugo Norden, Chris Roze, Harold Shapero, Larry Alan Smith, and Yehudi Wyner. From 1990 to 1998, Hoffman worked as an editor at the music engraving company Scores International in Boston, and he was hired as an editor at ECS Publishing immediately thereafter.

Since the mid-1980s, Hoffman has composed a substantial body of choral music. Many of these pieces reflect his Jewish heritage, and his sacred works can be used in temple services. This music is also sung widely in churches, high schools, universities, and by professional choral ensembles. In addition, he has composed choral works using secular texts along with pieces for keyboard solo, solo voice, chamber ensembles, and full orchestra. Hoffman’s work has been commissioned by ensembles such as the Carolina Brass and ALEA III (a contemporary music ensemble). His piece ...

(Walter)

(b Port Colborne, ON, Oct 14, 1927; d Caledon East, ON, April 3, 1998). Canadian choral conductor, arranger, editor, and teacher. After graduating from the University of Toronto (BM 1950), he conducted the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra and All-Varsity Mixed Chorus, was a choir member at St. Mary Magdelene Church under Healey Willan, and apprenticed with Sir Ernest MacMillan as assistant conductor of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. In 1964 he was appointed conductor of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, a position he held until 1997. He taught choral music at the University of Toronto from 1965 to 1968, and was Adjunct Professor from 1997 until his death in 1998. After his death, the University of Toronto’s Elmer Iseler Chair in Conducting was established in his honor.

Iseler’s work with his professional choirs established his reputation in Canada and internationally. In 1954 he helped found Canada’s first professional choir, the Toronto Festival Singers. He founded the Elmer Iseler Singers in ...

(b Saxdalen, Dec 12, 1936; d July 14, 2010). Swedish composer, poet and journal editor. He studied the piano and composition privately with Wiggen, but was mainly self-taught as a composer. In 1966 he joined the music department of Swedish radio and became the programme director of the central department in 1979. He was editor of Nutida musik from 1967–1977. At the beginning of the 1960s he wrote a few piano pieces, including a Sonata for Pianist (1961), but most of his work was in sound poetry in the concretist spirit, from the late 1970s often in close co-operation with his wife, the singer Kerstin Ståhl, as inspiration and interpreter. He experimented first with associative ‘wordscapes’, in which rhythmic and phonetic patterns were controlled by numerical systems, and went on to produce concrete poems and ‘text-sound compositions’. These latter pieces, the first of which was written in ...

(b Cleveland, OH, Aug 13, 1907; d New York, NY, March 13, 2002). American soprano, music publisher, and concert manager. She studied singing with Ruth Thayer Burnham while attending Abbot Academy, Andover, and later at Wellesley College (BA 1929). After two years as an actress at the Cleveland Playhouse, she sang in Gabriel Pierné’s La croisade des enfants with the Cleveland Orchestra (1932). She was then coached by Eva Gauthier in New York and made her debut there in 1934 at Town Hall in the North American premiere of Handel’s solo cantata La Lucrezia. Three years later she sang Butterfly and Tosca with the Royal Flemish Opera in Antwerp. After meeting Sibelius in Finland, she returned to the United States and introduced a number of his songs in concert (1938). During World War II Johnson escorted a convoy of refugees from Paris to Spain and as a result of the ordeal lost her voice. She joined the staff of ...