Otto Luening
Otto Clarence Luening ( born June 15, 1900 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, † September 2, 1996 in New York City ) was a German-born American composer, conductor and flutist. He was one of the pioneer of electroacoustic music ( electronic music and tape music ) in the United States.
Life
Otto Luening was born 1900 as a son of the German singer, pianist and conductor Eugene Luening and his wife, the singer Emma Luening, Milwaukee. His father studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, sang with Richard Wagner later and stood from 1879 to 1904 the Milwaukee Music Society ago.
The Luening family moved to Munich in 1912, where Otto was taught by Alois Schellhorn, flutist at the Munich Court Orchestra. From 1915 to 1917, he then studied flute and piano with Josif Becht and composition with Anton Beer- Walbrunn at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich. From 1917 to 1920 he studied composition with Philipp Jarnach and conducting with Volkmar Andreae at the Zurich Conservatory. He also took private lessons with Ferruccio Busoni at the University of Zurich. In 1917, he played the flute and percussion in the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. Under the pseudonym James P. Cleveland, he entered from 1918 to 1919 as an actor in the English Players Company in appearance.
In 1920 he went to Chicago and was hired as a musician at the Stratford Movie Theatre Orchestra. There he studied harmony, music theory and counterpoint with William Middelschulte, which mediated the doctrine of Bernhard Ziehn. He became assistant to Eugène Aynsley Goossens, who the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra directed and acted from 1925 to 1928 as a conductor in the opera department of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. He conducted the premieres of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All and Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium. In 1928 he took a stay abroad in Cologne, where he gave concerts.
From 1932 to 1934 he taught counterpoint, harmony and music history at the University of Arizona in Tucson. From 1934 to 1944 he headed the music department of Bennington College in Vermont. Within the Bennington Composers Conference he brought Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Paul Hindemith and Carl Ruggles to Vermont. In 1941 he founded with Alan Carter the Green Mountain Festival in Middlebury.
From 1944 to 1959 he was Music Director of the Brander Matthews Hall at Columbia University in New York. From 1949 to 1968 he was professor ibid. At the same time he taught from 1944 to 1964 at Barnard College. In 1940 he founded the American Music Center, which he headed until 1960. From 1945 to 1951 he was president of the American Composers Alliance. In 1949 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Academy in Rome. In 1954 he founded, together with Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel the label Composers Recordings, which he chaired from 1968 to 1974.
Since the 50s, he worked on electronic music. In 1951, he led with Vladimir Ussachevski, with whom he shared twenty compositions wrote, at the Museum of Modern Art on the first concert of tape music (with Leopold Stokowski ) in the USA. It was later broadcast on the Today Show by Dave Garroway. In 1959 he founded with Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions and Vladimir Ussachevski the Columbia - Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, the oldest institution for Computer Music and Electronic Music in the USA. After working at Columbia University, where he taught from 1971 to 1973 composition at the Juilliard School.
Prizes, Awards and Honors
Works
Luening composed out of chamber works in a different occupation, piano pieces, songs, choirs and opera Evangeline, two symphonic fantasies, symphonic interludes, a serenade and a suite. With its atonal, polytonality and serial works, he belonged to the musical avant-garde of the United States.
Writings
- Modern Music., 1943.
- Odyssey of an American Composer. The Autobiography of Otto Luening. Scribner, New York 1980.
Student
His composition students count Wendy Carlos, Wen-chung Chou, Gloria Coates, John Corigliano, Philip Corner, Mario Davidovsky, Charles Dodge, Malcolm Goldstein, Daniel Goode, Patrick hardish, Ulysses Kay, Karl Korte, Ezra Laderman, Marvin David Levy, William Mayer, John Herbert McDowell, Joseph Pehrson, Eric Salzman, Elliott Schwartz, Seymour Shifrin, Faye- Ellen Silverman, Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen.