Peter Westergaard

Peter Talbot Westergaard ( born 1931 in Urbana, Illinois) is an American composer and music theorist. He taught at Princeton University.

Career

Westergaard was born in Urbana. He studied at Harvard and Princeton with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt and Edward Cone and graduated in 1953 and 1956 as a Master of Fine Arts from. He also studied with Walter Piston and - on a Fulbright scholarship - Darius Milhaud (Paris ) and Wolfgang Fortner in Freiburg i.Brg.

Westergaard has taught at Columbia University, Amherst College, and in 1968 at Princeton University, where he among other things, an opera studio built. As a composer he wrote mostly operas and chamber music.

Works

Operas

• Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos (1966 )
• The Tempest (1994 )
• Moby Dick: Scenes from at Imaginary Opera ( 2004)
• Alice in Wonderland ( 2006)

Writings

• Peter Westergaard An Introduction to Tonal Theory. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.