Virginia Claire Seay Ploeser (8 August 1922 - 23 November 2015) [1] was an American composer and musicologist who studied and collaborated with composer Ernst Krenek. She published her works under the name Virginia Seay.
Seay was born in Palo Alto, California, [2] to Claire Soule and Welford Seay. She studied with Krenek at Vassar College, where she earned a degree in music composition in 1944, followed by a master's degree from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, also under Krenek's tutelage. She married James Ploeser in 1944, and they had three children, Monica, Stephen, and Christine. [1] [3]
During Seay's time in Minnesota in the 1940s, one of her compositions was performed by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. [3] In 1945, she won the third Young Composers Contest of the Federation of Music Clubs with her composition San Clemente, Low Tide, which was broadcast on national radio. [4] [5] Krenek performed piano music she composed at a concert at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. [6]
At Hamline, Seay collaborated with Krenek to translate his opera Karl V. from German to English. Krenek used a motif composed by Seay in his Hurricane Variations for Piano, opus 100 in 1944. [6] The following year, in his composition Tricks and Trifles, Krenek composed 22 variations on a four-note motif from a string quartet composed by Seay. [7] Krenek and Seay collaborated (with Russell G. Harris and Martha Johnson) on the book Hamline Studies in Musicology. [8] It included a chapter by Seay, “A Contribution to the Problem of Mode in Medieval Music.” [9]
Seay's family lived in New Zealand from 1949 to 1954, where her husband had a Fulbright Scholarship to teach abroad. From 1957 to 2013, Seay taught music and other subjects in Catholic schools in San Jose and San Francisco. [3]
Seay's compositions are numbered through at least opus 8 (see below). Her works include:
Ernst Heinrich Krenek was an Austrian, later American, composer of Czech origin. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now (1939), a study of Johannes Ockeghem (1953), and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music (1974). Krenek wrote two pieces using the pseudonym Thornton Winsloe.
Olga Neuwirth is an Austrian contemporary classical composer, visual artist and author. She gained fame mainly through her operas and music theater works, which often deal with topical and decidedly political themes of identity, violence and intolerance.
Louise Juliette Talma was an American composer, academic, and pianist. After studies in New York and in France, piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger, she focused on composition from 1935. She taught at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and at Hunter College. Her opera The Alcestiad was the first full-scale opera by an American woman staged in Europe. She was the first women in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and being awarded the Sibelius Medal for Composition.
The viola sonata is a sonata for viola, sometimes with other instruments, usually piano. The earliest viola sonatas are difficult to date for a number of reasons:
Berthold Goldschmidt was a German Jewish composer who spent most of his life in England. The suppression of his work by Nazi Germany, as well as the disdain with which many Modernist critics elsewhere dismissed his "anachronistic" lyricism, stranded the composer in the wilderness for many years before he was given a revival in his final decade.
Alice Anne LeBaron is a United States composer and harpist.
Avo Sõmer is an American musicologist music theorist, and composer, of Estonian birth.
Franz Salmhofer was an Austrian composer, clarinetist and conductor. He studied the clarinet, composition and musicology in Vienna. Salmhofer served successively as Kapellmeister of the Burgtheater, Director of the Vienna State Opera and Director of the Vienna Volksoper and composed a number of works, few of which are played today.
Karl V. is an opera, described as a Bühnenwerk mit Musik by Ernst Krenek, his opus 73. The German libretto is by the composer. His student Virginia Seay collaborated with him on the English translation of the libretto.
Johanna Magdalena Beyer was a German-American composer and pianist.
Lucijan Marija Škerjanc was a Slovene composer, music pedagogue, conductor, musician, and writer who was accomplished on and wrote for a number of musical instruments such as the piano, violin and clarinet. His style reflected late romanticism with qualities of expressionism and impressionism in his pieces, often with a hyperbolic artistic temperament, juxtaposing the dark against melodic phrases in his music.
Robert William Witt was an American neoclassical and experimental composer. A native of Youngstown, Ohio, he was a composer, pianist, and professor of music at Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University. Like his mentor, Vincent Persichetti, Witt was well known for exploration of new musical forms and for integrating old themes into new works.
Gladys Mercedes Nordenstrom was an American composer.
Clare Shore is an American composer, music educator mezzo-soprano, and conductor.
Beverly Grigsby née Pinsky is an American composer, musicologist and electronic/computer music pioneer.
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 important among Stravinsky's compositions as his first and longest completely dodecaphonic work, but is not often performed. It has been described as "austere" but also as a "culminating point" in his career as an artist, "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".
Edith Borroff was an American musicologist and composer. Her compositions include over 60 commissioned works, including pieces for the stage; for her primary instrument—the organ; choral, vocal, and orchestral music; and several critical editions of works by previous composers such as Jubilate by J.-J. Cassanéa de Mondonville. She also wrote at least 7 books, including the textbook Music in Europe and the United States: a History, as well as various peer-reviewed articles and publications.
John Lessard was an American composer and music educator noted among peers for his eloquent and dramatic neo-classical works for piano and voice, chamber ensembles, and orchestra, as well as for his playful pieces for mixed percussion ensembles. He was also an accomplished pianist and conductor.
Marius Flothuis, born and died in Amsterdam, was a Dutch composer, musicologist and music critic.