American composer Gloria Coates has died. Coates displayed an unconventional, though highly-developed sense of texture, grasping the power of microtones and clusters from an early age. But these were often tied to comprehensible forms: canons, palindromes, simple structures. A prolific artist, she composed 16 symphonies, 11 string quartets, orchestral works, song cycles, and a chamber opera.

Hers was a unique voice. I often programmed her String Quartet No. 8 – with its three movements “On Wings of Sound,” “In Falling Timbers Buried,” and “Prayer” – during my broadcast memorials of 9/11. In the context, her sinking glissandi were especially effective, both visceral and chilling.

Coates was also an abstract expressionist painter. Some of her artwork has graced the covers of her albums. For much of her life, she made her living solely from her compositions. Allegedly, she was the most prolific female symphonist.

Born in Wisconsin in 1933, Coates largely made her home in Munich since 1969. At the time of her death, she was 89 years-old.

String Quartet No. 8 (2001/02)

Symphony No. 1 “Music on Open Strings” (1972)

“Holographic Universe” for violin and orchestra (1975)

“Cette blanche agonie” (1988), after Stephane Mallarmé

In English:

The virgin, vivid and beautiful today
Will it tear for us with a blow of its drunken wing
This hard, forgotten lake that haunts beneath the frost
The transparent glacier of flights that have not fled!
A swan of other times remembers that it is he
Magnificent but without hope of freeing himself
For not having sung the region where to live
When of the sterile winter glistened the tediousness.
His whole neck will shake off this white agony
By space inflicted on the bird which denies it
But not the horror of the soil in which his plumage is caught.
Phantom that to this place his pure brightness assigns,
It immobilizes itself in the cold dream of scorn
That clothes during the useless exile of the Swan.

Symphony No. 8 “Indian Sounds” (1990/91)

Symphony No. 15 “Homage to Mozart” (2004/05)

A conversation with Bruce Duffie

http://www.bruceduffie.com/coates4.html