This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1956.
The Crane School of Music is located in Potsdam, New York, and is one of three schools which make up the State University of New York (SUNY) at Potsdam.
Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).
Thea Musgrave CBE is a Scottish composer of opera and classical music. She has lived in the United States since 1972.
Jake Heggie is an American composer of opera, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. He is best known for his operas and art songs as well as for his collaborations with internationally renowned performers and writers.
Judith Weir is a British composer and the first female Master of the Queen's Music.
Mark Adamo is an American composer, librettist and professor of music composition at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He was born in Philadelphia.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.
David Bruce is a British composer of contemporary classical music and a YouTuber.
Bruce Adolphe is a composer, music scholar, the author of several books on music, and pianist. He is currently Resident Lecturer and Director of Family Concerts of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and founder and creative director of The Learning Maestros, formerly called PollyRhythm Productions. He also founded the nonprofit 501(c)(3) educational organization Artful Thinkers. Adolphe performs a weekly "Piano Puzzler" segment on the nationally broadcast Performance Today classical music radio program hosted by Fred Child. "Piano Puzzler" was on National Public Radio starting in 2002, and is now on American Public Media. The program is also available as a podcast and from iTunes. Mr. Adolphe is also artistic director of Off the Hook Arts Festival, an interdisciplinary festival combining music, science, and visual arts, based in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Fat Pig is a play by Neil LaBute. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 2004 and won the 2005 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play. The play had its London premiere in 2008 and was nominated for Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. The play involves a romantic relationship between a plus-size woman and a young professional man, whose friend denigrates the woman as being "fat". The play was also adapted into an opera in 2022, by composer Matt Boehler.
Royce Vavrek is a Canadian-born Brooklyn-based librettist, playwright, dance scenarist, musical theatre writer and filmmaker known for his collaborations with composers David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Mikael Karlsson, Ricky Ian Gordon, Paola Prestini and Du Yun, soprano Lauren Worsham, producers Beth Morrison and Lawrence Edelson, and conductors Steven Osgood, Julian Wachner and Alan Pierson.
The New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) presents an annual series of concerts in New York City dedicated to the art of song, classical, modern and popular. In addition, this organization commissions new works and recordings, including the Grammy Award-winning recording of Leonard Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles (Koch), and the Grammy-nominated recording of Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen.
Mark Grey is an American classical music composer, sound designer and sound engineer.
John Laurence Seymour was an American composer and playwright. As a composer Seymour is best known for his operas, which have "complex orchestral textures and italianate lyricism".
Odaline de la Martinez is a Cuban-American composer and conductor, currently residing in the UK. She is the artistic director of Lontano, a London-based contemporary music ensemble which she co-founded in 1976 with New Zealander flautist Ingrid Culliford, and was the first woman to conduct at the BBC Promenade Concerts in 1984. As well as frequent appearances as a guest conductor with leading orchestras throughout Great Britain, including all the BBC orchestras, she has conducted several leading ensembles around the world, including the Ensemble 2e2m in Paris; the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; the Australian Youth Orchestra; the OFUNAM and the Camerata of the Americas in Mexico; and the Vancouver Chamber Orchestra. She is also known as a broadcaster for BBC Radio and Television and has recorded extensively for several labels.
Elena Langer is a Russian-born British composer of opera and other contemporary classical music. Her work has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, Wigmore Hall, Opera national du Rhin, Strasbourg, and Milton Court, Barbican Centre. She studied piano and composition at the Gnessin State Musical College in Moscow and composition at the Moscow Conservatoire; in 1999 she moved to London and studied composition at the Royal College of Music (1999–2000) with Julian Anderson and the Royal Academy of Music (2001–03) with Simon Bainbridge.
Matthew Peterson is a composer of operas, choral works, orchestral and chamber music.
Golem is a chamber opera by English composer John Casken, with a libretto by the composer in collaboration with French-Lebanese theatre director Pierre Audi. The opera was first performed at the Almeida Theatre in London on 18 June 1989. Published by Schott, it was played again and recorded.
This article is for major events and other topics related to classical music in 2022.
