 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(October 2024) |
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Andrew Thomas Kuster is an American writer, composer, and conductor.
| A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(October 2024) |
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Andrew Thomas Kuster is an American writer, composer, and conductor.
Kuster was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Thomas and Judy Kuster. He grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota. After attending Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota, he earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. At St. Olaf he studied composition with Arthur Campbell and performed with the St. Olaf Choir under Kenneth Jennings and Anton Armstrong. He earned a Master of Music in Composition from Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he studied with Steve Heitzeg. In 2000, he received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in the Literature and Performance of Choral Music from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he studied with Joan Catoni Conlon, Lawrence Kaptein, Lynn Whitten, William Kearns, and Alan Luhring. He worked as a text reviewer for the Text Creation Partnership at the University of Michigan and as staff editor for the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York City. He is a member of the American Choral Directors Association Research and Publications Committee. From 1997 to 2011 he was married to the composer Kristin Kuster. Currently, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Dr. Kuster works as Executive Editor of scholarly editions at Music of the United States of America.
He has written and composed music for Lessons With Hypatia, a fictionalized historical account of the philosopher Hypatia and the burning of the Library of Alexandria for music theater, and The Soulless, a work for music theater set about love, death, and discovering joy in the unexpected.
He regularly organizes and conducts performances and recordings of music for chamber chorus. He has worked closely with University of Michigan faculty composers Evan Chambers and Andy Kirshner in performances and recordings of their new works. He has specialized in music by Stravinsky, Messiaen, Amy Beach, Kurt Weill, and Heinrich Schütz. His conducting responsibilities have included the University of Colorado Women's Chorus, the Boulder Chorale, and the associate conductor of the University Musical Society Choral Union in Ann Arbor.
He co-edited the critical edition of Zaubernacht by Kurt Weill ( ISBN 978-0-913574-65-2) and has published several scholarly performing editions of music by Heinrich Schütz, including Geistliche Chor-Music ( ISBN 1-4116-4243-0). His articles about Webern, Rachmaninoff, and Britten have appeared in the Choral Journal, and A-R Editions has published his critical edition of Amy Beach's The Sea-Fairies ( ISBN 0-89579-435-7).
In 2001, the American Choral Directors Association awarded Dr. Kuster the Julius Herford Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Research in Choral Music for his writing about Igor Stravinsky's twelve-tone choral works.
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A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir.
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen in 1943.
Heinrich Schütz was a German early Baroque composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach and one of the most important composers of the 17th century. He is credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany and continuing its evolution from the Renaissance into the early Baroque. Most of his surviving music was written for the Lutheran church, primarily for the Electoral Chapel in Dresden. He wrote what is traditionally considered the first German opera, Dafne, performed at Torgau in 1627, the music of which has since been lost, along with nearly all of his ceremonial and theatrical scores. Schütz was a prolific composer, with more than 500 surviving works.
Samuel Scheidt was a German composer, organist and teacher of the early Baroque era.
Fredrik Melius Christiansen was a Norwegian-born violinist and choral conductor in the Lutheran choral tradition. He is most notable for his many a cappella choral arrangements, and for founding The St. Olaf Choir in 1912.
Christoph Bernhard was born in Kolberg, Pomerania, and died in Dresden. He was a German Baroque composer and musician. He studied with former Sweelinck-pupil Paul Siefert in Danzig and in Warsaw. By the age of 20, he was singing at the electoral court in Dresden under Heinrich Schütz and composed some of the music for the Master's funeral. He then spent a year in Copenhagen to study singing with Agostino Fontana.
Kristin P. Kuster is an American composer of symphonic, vocal and chamber music.
Richard Toensing was an American composer and music educator. He studied composition at St. Olaf College and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1967. His most notable teachers include Ross Lee Finney and Leslie Bassett.
René Clausen is an American composer, conductor emeritus of The Concordia Choir, and professor of music at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. His works are widely performed by high school and church choirs while his more technically demanding pieces have been performed and recorded by college and professional choirs. Among his many accolades, his recent recording, "Life & Breath: Choral Works by René Clausen," received three Grammy Awards at the 55th Grammy Awards in 2013.
Elegy for J.F.K. is a piece of vocal music composed by the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky in 1964, commemorating the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Heinrich Albert was a German composer and poet of the 17th century. He was a member of the Königsberg Poetic Society. As a song composer, he was strongly influenced by Heinrich Schütz.
Stephen Chatman is an American-born Canadian composer residing in Vancouver. His compositions have been performed across Canada and in the United States.
Raymond Beegle is an American piano accompanist and vocal chamber musician.
Ingeborg Reichelt was a German soprano singer known for her interpretation of works by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Threni: id est Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae, usually referred to simply as Threni, is a musical setting by Igor Stravinsky of verses from the Book of Lamentations in the Latin of the Vulgate, for solo singers, chorus and orchestra. It is Stravinsky's first and longest completely dodecaphonic work, but is not often performed. It has been called "austere" but also a "culminating point" in his career, "important both spiritually and stylistically" and "the most ambitious and structurally the most complex" of all his religious compositions, and even "among Stravinsky's greatest works".
Abbie Betinis is an American composer. She has composed music for a variety of musical ensembles, and is best known for her choral music and other vocal works.
Matteo Messori is an Italian keyboard player, conductor, musicologist, composer and teacher. He performs on period instruments including the harpsichord, pipe organ, clavichord and pedal piano. He founded the early music ensemble Cappella Augustana.
Cantiones sacrae, Op. 4, is a collection of forty pieces of vocal sacred music on Latin texts, composed by Heinrich Schütz and first published in 1625. The pieces have individual numbers 53 to 93 in the Schütz-Werke-Verzeichnis (SWV), the catalogue of his works. The general title Cantiones sacrae was common at the time and was used by many composers, including Palestrina, Byrd and Tallis and Hans Leo Hassler (1591).
Geistliche Chormusik is a collection of motets on German texts for choir by Heinrich Schütz. It was printed in Dresden in 1648 as his Opus Undecimum, and comprises 29 individual settings for five to seven voices, which were assigned numbers 369 to 397 in the Schütz-Werke-Verzeichnis (SWV). The original title was Geistliche Chor-Music, Erster Theil which indicates that Schütz planned a second part. It is also known as Geistliche Chor-Music 1648. The collection contains earlier and new works and a German arrangement of a motet by Andrea Gabrieli.
Karl Vötterle was a German music publisher.
