Richard Toensing (March 11, 1940 - July 2, 2014) was an American composer and music educator. [1] 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.
After an initial appointment at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey in 1966, Toensing joined the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder College of Music in 1972. Toensing retired in 2005 from the College of Music, where he served as Professor of Composition and as the former Director of the University's Electronic Music Studio, New Music Festival, and New Music Ensemble, as well as Chair of the Composition and Theory department from 1984 to 2001.
Raised a Lutheran, Toensing joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 1990s. He later wrote Christmas carols and Kontakion on the Nativity of Christ, a setting of a sixth-century poem by St. Romanos. [2]
Toensing received numerous awards for composition most notably from Columbia University (Joseph H. Bearns Prize), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and BMI. He was selected as a Fellow for the MacDowell Colony three different times.
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented. Pärt's music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. His most performed works include Fratres (1977), Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), and Für Alina (1976). From 2011 to 2018, Pärt was the most performed living composer in the world, and the second most performed in 2019—after John Williams. The Arvo Pärt Centre, in Laulasmaa, was opened to the public in 2018.
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.
Alan Hovhaness was an American-Armenian composer. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers, with his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies and 434 opus numbers. The true tally is well over 500 surviving works, since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works.
Roscoe Mitchell is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist, and educator, known for being "a technically superb – if idiosyncratic – saxophonist". The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as "one of the key figures" in avant-garde jazz; All About Jazz stated in 2004 that he had been "at the forefront of modern music" for more than 35 years. Critic Jon Pareles in The New York Times has mentioned that Mitchell "qualifies as an iconoclast". In addition to his own work as a bandleader, Mitchell is known for cofounding the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
Douglas Stuart Moore was an American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author. A composer who mainly wrote works with an American subject, his music is generally characterized by lyricism in a popular or conservative style which generally eschewed the more experimental progressive trends of musical modernism. Composer Virgil Thomson described Moore as a neoromantic composer who was influenced by American folk music. While several of his works enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, only his folk opera The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) has remained well known into the 21st century.
Michael Peter Finnissy is an English composer, pianist, and pedagogue. An immensely prolific composer, his music is "notable for its dramatic urgency and expressive immediacy".
Sir James Loy MacMillan, is a Scottish classical composer and conductor.
Mannes School of Music is a music conservatory in The New School, a private research university in New York City. In the fall of 2015, Mannes moved from its previous location on Manhattan's Upper West Side to join the rest of the New School campus in Arnhold Hall at 55 W. 13th Street.
Jennifer Elaine Higdon is an American composer of contemporary classical music. She has received many awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Percussion Concerto in 2010, Viola Concerto in 2018, and Harp Concerto in 2020. Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019, she was a professor of composition at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1994 to 2021.
The kontakion is a form of hymn performed in the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic liturgical traditions.
Robert Daniel Morris is an American composer and music theorist.
Romanos the Melodist was a Byzantine hymnographer and composer, who is a central early figure in the history of Byzantine music. Called "the Pindar of rhythmic poetry", he flourished during the sixth century, though the earliest manuscripts of his works are dated centuries after this. He was the foremost Kontakion composer of his time.
Kanon Pokajanen is a 1997 composition by Arvo Pärt for four-part (SATB) choir. The text is the "Canon of Repentance to Our Lord Jesus Christ", an Orthodox hymn. The text is sung in Church Slavonic and following the tradition of Russian sacred choral music, it is sung a cappella.
Ross Lee Finney Junior was an American composer who taught for many years at the University of Michigan.
Constantin Floros is a Greek-German musicologist. He studied law at the University of Thessaloniki (1947–1951) and then composition and conducting at the Vienna Music Academy. At the same time he studied musicology with Erich Schenk at the Vienna University as well as art history, philosophy and psychology. In 1955 he obtained the doctorate in Vienna with a dissertation on Campioni. He continued his musicological studies with Husmann at Hamburg University (1957–1960), where in 1961 he completed his Habilitation in musicology with a work on the Byzantine kontakion. In 1967 he became supernumerary professor, in 1972 professor of musicology and in 1995 professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg. He received the honorary doctorate from the University of Athens in 1999.
Idiomelon —pl. idiomela—is a type of sticheron found in the liturgical books used in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite, and many other Orthodox communities like Old Believers. Idiomela are unique compositions, while avtomela or aftomela—sing. automelon, avtomelon or aftomelon —were used to create other hymns by a composition over the avtomelon's melody and following the poetic meter provided by the musical rhythm. The genre composed over these avtomela was characterised as prosomoion or prosomeion.
Harry Wakefield Bramma is a British organist and composer of Anglican church music. He served as director of the Royal School of Church Music from 1989 to 1998 and as director of music at All Saints, Margaret Street, 1989–2004.
Richard Aaker Trythall was an American and Italian composer and pianist of contemporary classical music.