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Michael Colgrass |
 Biography |
Michael Colgrass (b. 1932) began his musical career in Chicago where his first professional experiences were as a jazz drummer (1944-49). He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1954 with a degree in performance and composition and his studies included training with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Festival and Lukas Foss at the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood. He served two years as timpanist in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, Germany and then spent eleven years supporting his composing as a free-lance percussionist in New York City where his wide-ranging performance venues included the New York Philharmonic, American Ballet Theater, Dizzie Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway, the Columbia Recording Orchestra’s Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera and jazz ensembles. He organized the percussion sections for Gunther Schuller’s recordings and concerts, as well as for premieres of new works by John Cage, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varese, and many others. During this New York period he continued to study composition with Wallingford Riegger (1958) and Ben Weber (1958-60).
Colgrass has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, The Boston Symphony, The Minnesota Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Manhattan and Muir String Quartets, The Brighton Festival in England, The Fromm and Ford Foundations, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and numerous other orchestras, chamber groups, choral groups and soloists.
He received the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Déjà vu, which was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. In addition, he received an Emmy Award in 1982 for a PBS documentary "Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass." He has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, A Rockerfeller Grant, First Prize in the Barlow and Sudler International Wind Ensemble Competitions, and the 1988 Jules Leger Prize for Chamber Music.
Among his most recent works are Ghosts of Pangea (2000) for orchestra, commissioned by the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, for their millennium celebration, Dream Dancer (2001) for alto saxophone and wind orchestra, commissioned by the World-Wide Concurrent Premieres & Commissioning Fund, Inc. for 25 wind ensembles, and Crossworlds (2002) for flute piano and orchestra commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and premiered 7-8-9-12 March 2002 with soloists Marina Piccinini and Andreas Heafliger.
As an author, Colgrass recently published his first book, My Lessons With Kumi, a teaching tale and exercise book, outlining his techniques for performance and creativity, on stage and off. He also gives workshops throughout the world on the psychology and technique of performance, drawing on his extensive American and European studies in a wide spectrum of performing arts.
He lives in Toronto and makes his living internationally as a composer. His wife, Ulla, is a writer and editor who writes about music and the arts.
"Mr. Colgrass is something of a maverick…turning to what can best be described as The New Eclecticism. He will use serial textures, but will mix them with jazz, or outright romanticism, or dissonance a la Ives. He also has evolved a distinct sort of miniature style that is extremely personal and poetic. The songs are short, sometimes haunting, full of a strange kind of tenderness."
--Harold C Schoenberg, The New York Times
"The work is as fanciful as the title, which refers to a fictional letter the composer claims to have received from the Viennese master…The effect is like watching a Federico Fellini movie…a delightful contemporary work."
--Willa J. Conrad, Toledo Blade
"A continuous subtle intensity gives the whole an incandescent feeling. After a half dozen hearings, I am ever more drawn to this work…ready to proclaim it a masterpiece."
--James H. North in Fanfare Magazine
"There’s a scenario behind this double concerto for flute and piano. Loosely speaking, the piano represents the Western musical tradition, from Baroque counterpoint to beetle-browed 12-tone composition. The flute represents various Eastern traditions. The two instruments interact, playfully try to speak each other’s languages, or decline to. Each can do things the other can’t. The flute can’t play counterpoint, the piano can’t bend notes. Each learns a little something from the other, and the piece ends in a quick game of hide-and-seek.
--Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
"‘Déjà vu’ evokes both personal and universal pasts. On the one hand, it recalls the composer’s early career as a percussionist; on the other, it uses vague historical allusions, apparent when the unifying theme is transformed into styles ranging from classic to romantic to jazz to serial. Most important, his wild eclecticism - which might spell destruction in the hands of a lesser composer - never threaten the work’s unity and integrity."
--K. Robert Schwarz in High Fidelity
"Colgrass’ work is a well-written, interestingly scored, evocative piece that effectively reflects the musical and social history of America."
--Richard Conway, Springfield [MA] Daily News.
"The music is full of the mystery and the matter-of-fact, it has mountains and rivers and bubbles in it, singing and dancing, mediation and the moon, all precisely, colorfully and imaginatively caught."
--Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
"Colgrass and the local producer, Peter Sargent, kept the music and story moving around deftly, intelligently, among the cast of eight. It was a piece for an audience, remarkably free of the blatancy, mockery and posturing that have tempted many experiments in this genre. ‘Virgil’s Dream’ had ideas and a shrewd theatrical sense."
--Frank Peters, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
2002
