Gloria Coates' Early Life
Gloria Coates is an American composer, born in Wausau, Wisconsin in 1938. Coates showed interest in musical experimentation and composition from a young age, and was already recognized for her work by the age of twelve, when she entered and won a composition competition hosted by the National Federation of Music Clubs. She continued down this musical path she had found herself in, crossing paths with Alexander Tcherepnin in 1952 - a foundational figure in her musical education and training. Along with Tcherepnin's private instruction. Coates studied at Louisiana State University and Columbia primarily with Otto Luening and Jack Beeson. Although Coates has spent later years in life focusing on composition and the promotion of music, she received degrees in composition as well as singing theater, art, and musicology. In 1969, Coates decided to move to Munich, Germany, which is when she began to focus the majority of her creative energies on composition more than anything else she had studied in America.
Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977)
Coates' first mentor in her musical career, Alexander Tcherepnin (right), was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia to a musically gifted and accomplished family. Following in his parents footsteps, Tcherepnin was a very active composer from his teen years onward, and had developed a fresh style which melded late romantic and early serialism. Following the completion of his compositional and piano studies in Paris, Tcherepnin began to create a name for himself internationally by premiering several of his works in America. His First Symphony (1927) is notorious for nearly instigating a riot due to the exclusive use of unpitched percussion and percussive sounds in the strings section during its third movement. Despite his association with much more well-known composers such as Stravinsky, Ravel, and Prokovfiev, his works were never picked up as readily, and he still continues to be discovered by musicians around the world.
Jack Beeson (1921-2010)
Jack Beeson (right) began working at Columbia just a year after Luening, in 1945. Beeson was very active in the music department of Columbia University, and has impacted it in ways that can still be observed to this day. Along with being the chair of the Department of Music (1968-72), Beeson greatly contributed to founding the DMA program in Composition and an Ethnomusicology PhD program. Outside of Columbia University, Beeson was contributing to American music on a much larger scale, and held many high-ranking positions within several organizations. To name a few, he was the treasurer and vice president for music at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP board member, and co-president of Composers Recording, Inc.. He was involved and remained active within the greater music community in America right up until his death, not to mention all of the music he had composed during his life. He is well known for his operas, of which he wrote ten within the American vernacular tradition. These include Hello Out There (1954), The Sweet Bye and Bye (1956), and Cyrano (1990).
National Federation of Music Clubs
The National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC) is a non-profit organization founded in 1898 with the goal of promoting American music. This is done through supporting the music itself, composers, educators, and performers. Today, the NFMC is the largest music-based nonprofit organization, with over one hundred thousand participating members. The NFMC hosts a plethora of events and activities in order to give artists from all walks of life the opportunity to become involved with the greater music community. Festivals, competitions, and general meet-ups for the average music lover give artists the chance to show off their talent to a community that will support and appreciate them. This organization is where Gloria Coates received her first award pertaining to her compositions, which was presumably a cash reward.
Otto Luening (1900-1996)
Otto Luening (bottom right) was one of two professors under which Coates studied while attending Columbia University. Luening was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and studied in Europe before returning to the US to hold a job in music education. Before arriving at Columbia in 1944, he taught at the University of Arizona, Eastman School of Music, and Bennington College. Buy and large, Luening was a massive advocate for contemporary American music and composed over 300 works. Most of these were distinctly American and landed him in the same musical camp as Aaron Copeland and Samuel Barber, despite Luening not receiving the same fame as the former composers. A small portion of these works did allow Luening to stand out amongst contemporaries though, and cemented him as a innovative figure in the field of electronic music. Luening took an interest in experimenting with using electronic equipment in tandem with more traditional instruments, such as his Rhapsodic Variations for Tape Recorder and Orchestra (1953)(co-written with Vladimir Ussachevsky). In 1960, after having worked with Ussachevsky for nearly a decade, he and Luening co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which became a hotbed for aspiring composers of the mid-20th century.
