Benjamin Lees
Benjamin Lees ( born January 8, 1924 in Harbin, † 31 May, 2010 Glen Cove ) was an American composer.
Life
Just a year after Lee was born as the son of Russian parents in Manchuria, emigrated with his family to America, where the young Benjamin grew up in San Francisco. He received his first piano lessons at the age of 5 years, and 15 years old he began to compose. 1939 the family moved to Los Angeles. After his military service, he studied from 1945 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in Halsey Stevens, Ingolf Dahl and Ernst Kanitz. 1949-1954 followed by studies with George Antheil.
1953 Lee won with the Sonata for Two Pianos and String Quartet No. 1 the Fromm Music Foundation Award. 1954 a performance of his Profiles for Orchestra by the NBC Orchestra was broadcast nationwide on television. In the same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him a seven -year stay in Europe, where he finally settled in a small village near Paris. Among other things, Lee received during this period the UNESCO Award for his String Quartet No. 2 and the first non- British composer Sir Arnold Bax Medal of the Society in London.
1962 Lee was appointed as a professor of composition at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. In 1964 he moved to the Queens College, back around 1966 for two years to Baltimore. In the same year he received a second Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1973, he taught for a year at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Lee has received numerous commissions ( only three of the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 ) and other awards, to a Grammy nomination in 2004 for his Symphony No. 5.
Lee's last lived in Palm Springs, California.
Work
Lees rejected atonality and the use of specific " Americanisms " in his music, and preferred traditional compositional structures. The focus of his compositional work lies in the field of orchestral music. He wrote five symphonies and concert works (including two piano concertos, a violin concerto ), but also studied chamber music ( six string quartets, the String Quartet No. 6 was first performed in 2005 ).
At Lees' major works include the Symphony No. 4, entitled Memorial Candles, 1985 given in memory of the Holocaust from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in order. It includes a vocal part ( soprano solo ) on texts by Nelly Sachs and also draws on a solo violin.