Katherine Weintz Teck (born December 31, 1939) is an American author, composer, and founding member of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance. [1] [2] [3]
Teck was born in Mineola, New York, to Helen Elliot Bennett and Walter Henry Weintz. She has three brothers and one sister. Her father owned the Weintz Company, a direct mail company. [4]
Teck earned a B.A. in music from Vassar College, [2] an M.A. in composition from Columbia University [5] where she was a Seidl Fellow, and a certificate in arts management at Purchase College (State University of New York). [6] She also studied at the Mannes College of Music and with Harry Berv and Greg Squires. [2]
Teck has held a number of arts management jobs, freelanced as a French horn player, and worked as a studio musician for ballet and creative dance. A founding member of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance, she was given the organization's Louis Horst Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. [3] She taught several college courses in music with dance departments and has written books and articles about music for theatrical dance.
Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six.
The Nutcracker, Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination. The plot is an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet's first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on The Sleeping Beauty, assisted by Lev Ivanov. Although the complete and staged The Nutcracker ballet was not as successful as had been the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite that Tchaikovsky had premiered nine months earlier, The Nutcracker soon became popular.
Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold was an English composer. His works feature music in many genres, including a cycle of nine symphonies, numerous concertos, concert works, chamber music, choral music and music for brass band and wind band. His style is tonal and rejoices in lively rhythms, brilliant orchestration, and an unabashed tunefulness. He wrote extensively for the theatre, with five ballets specially commissioned by the Royal Ballet, as well as two operas and a musical. He also produced scores for more than a hundred films, among these The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Oscar.
William Grant Still Jr. was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. Born in Mississippi and growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and then Edgard Varèse. Because of his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Walter Hamor Piston, Jr., was an American composer of classical music, music theorist, and professor of music at Harvard University.
The National Ballet of Canada is a Canadian ballet company that was founded in 1951 in Toronto, Ontario, with Celia Franca, the first artistic director. A company of 70 dancers with its own orchestra, the National Ballet has been led since 2022 by artistic director Hope Muir. Renowned for its diverse repertoire, the company performs traditional full-length classics, embraces contemporary work and encourages the creation of new ballets, as well as the development of Canadian dancers and choreographers.
Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy LeFanu was an Irish-English composer. She is considered to be one of the finest composers Great Britain and Ireland have produced.
The Firebird is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Michel Fokine, who collaborated with Alexandre Benois and others on a scenario based on the Russian fairy tales of the Firebird and the blessing and curse it possesses for its owner. The Firebird was first performed at the Opéra de Paris on 25 June 1910 and was an immediate success, catapulting Stravinsky to international fame and leading to future Diaghilev-Stravinsky collaborations like Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).
Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, is a ballet by Sergei Prokofiev based on William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. First composed in 1935, it was substantially revised for its Soviet premiere in early 1940. Prokofiev made from the ballet three orchestral suites and a suite for solo piano.
Walter Johannes Damrosch was a Kingdom of Prussia-born American conductor and composer. He was the director of the New York Symphony Orchestra and conducted the world premiere performances of various works, including Aaron Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F and An American in Paris, and Jean Sibelius' Tapiola. Damrosch was also instrumental in the founding of Carnegie Hall. He also conducted the first performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the composer himself as soloist.
Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer.
John McCabe was a British composer and pianist. He created works in many different forms, including symphonies, ballets, and solo works for the piano. He served as director of the London College of Music from 1983 to 1990. Guy Rickards praised him as "one of Britain's finest composers in the past half-century" and "a pianist of formidable gifts and wide-ranging sympathies".
African-American dance has developed within various spaces throughout African-American communities in the United States, rather than studios, schools, or companies. These dances are usually centered on folk and social dance practice, though performance dance often supplies complementary aspects to this. Placing great value on improvisation, these dances are characterized by ongoing change and development. There are a number of notable African-American modern dance companies using African-American cultural dance as an inspiration, among these are the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theatre of Harlem,and Katherine Dunham Company. Hollywood and Broadway have also provided opportunities for African-American artists to share their work and for the public to support them.
Florence Marga Richter was an American composer of classical music, and pianist.
Dora Estella Knatchbull was a British composer and pianist. She composed works for orchestra, keyboard and voice, and music for opera and ballet, including ballets for performance by the dancer Adeline Genée.
Julius Penson Williams, is an American composer, conductor, and college professor. He is currently president of the Conductors Guild. An author of both instrumental and vocal music, Julius Williams has composed operas, symphonies, and chorus works for stage, concert hall, film, and television. Primarily a classically trained musician, Williams also writes in genres including gospel, jazz, and other contemporary forms.
Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In 2019, Coleman's orchestral work, Umoja, Anthem for Unity, was commissioned and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Coleman's Umoja is the first classical work by a living African American woman that the Philadelphia Orchestra has performed.
Richard Cameron-Wolfe is an American composer and pianist.
Katharine Mulky Warne was an American composer, pianist and teacher, who founded the Darius Milhaud Society and organized 15 Milhaud festivals in Cleveland, Ohio, to promote his music. She was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On June 27, 1953, She married Clinton L. Warne and they had three children: Kate, Clinton Jr. and Carolyn.
Mildred Elizabeth Thomson Souers was an American composer who wrote music for ballets and ballet studios, as well as for chamber ensembles, piano, and voice.