Michael Colgrass

Michael Charles Colgrass ( born April 22, 1932 in Chicago) is an American, living now in Canada composer and percussionist.

Life

Michael Colgrass collected from 1944 to 1949 first professional musical experience as a jazz drummer. In 1954 he completed his studies at the University of Illinois, which also included classes with Darius Milhaud ( Aspen Festival) and Lukas Foss ( Tanglewood ). Then he played almost two years as drummer of the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, then eleven years with various ensembles in New York, including the New York Philharmonic, with Dizzy Gillespie and with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in the recording series Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky. In this phase, further studies in composition with Wallingford Riegger fell and Ben Weber, also musical collaborations, inter alia, with Gunther Schuller ( Perceptions, 1961), Orchestra USA, John Cage, Elliott Carter and Edgar Varèse, for which he organized the Perkussionistengruppe (and even starred ).

Michael Colgrass, sponsored among others by two Guggenheim Fellowships, numerous commissions, mostly of American orchestras and ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra received. In 1978 he won with the composition Déjà vu for percussion and orchestra won the Pulitzer Prize of Music.

The now living in Toronto Michael Colgrass is also a music teacher active. 2010 published his autobiographical memories Adventures of an American Composer.

Work

The compositional work of Colgrass includes stage works ( including Virgil 's Dream, 1967), vocal music and instrumental works of different occupation, often with drums, at whose premieres he sometimes even participated as a soloist.

Expenses incurred during the 1950s and early 1960s compositions use serial techniques, influenced by his teachers Riegger and Weber. Mid -1960s to Colgrass sparked serialism. Many of his works show influences of jazz, in later work also serves as musical material earlier composers as a starting point for thematic processing, such as in the orchestral works Letter from Mozart ( 1976) and The Schubert Birds ( 1989).