Nationality: American
Born: 1908-2012
Education/Training: took piano lessons as a child, then entered the Horace Mann School in 1922 where he developed an interest in modern music; frequented concerts with Charles Ives, who sold insurance to his parents; entered Harvard as a student of English Literature, taking piano, oboe, and solfeggio and the Longy School; graduated from Harvard with an MA in music; studied for 3 years with Nadia Boulanger; received a doctorate from the Ecole Normale in Paris
Notable Compositions: Variations for Orchestra, Second Quartet, Double Concerto, Concerto for Orchestra, Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei
Assignments:
wrote for Modern Music and became director of Ballet Caravan; taught at St. John's College in Annapolis, Peabody Conservatory, Columbia University, Queens College, CUNY, Yale, MIT, Cornell University, and Juilliard
Curious Facts:
by the 1980s and 90s, his music was written mainly for Europeans due to an American reaction against modernism, leaving him increasingly isolated at home