Tag: Gloria Coates

Gloria Coates American Composer Dies at 89

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

August 25, 2023
9/11 Reflection Music and Remembrance

9-11: A morning for reflection. It may have been 19 years ago today, but everything about it is still so vivid.

When my telephone rang around 9:00 that morning, I was already at work, at home, on my computer, oblivious to the news. I picked up. A friend was on the line. She said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I imagined the Empire State Building and the B-25 accident, back in the 1940s. I’m thinking maybe a piper. Terrible in itself, but accidents do happen. Then she said one of the towers “fell over.” That was what propelled me to the TV.

Nothing could have prepared us for the spectacle and terror of that morning. Nothing would ever be the same.

I was one of the lucky ones. My parents happened to be in the air at that time, on the way to China. They were traveling west across Pennsylvania. At 10:03, United States Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, southeast of Pittsburgh. The phone lines were jammed. Nobody owned a cell phone. It was a long day until I learned that my parents’ flight had been grounded in Pittsburgh.

My heart goes out to those who died senselessly, and for their survivors, for whom the day remains vivid and painful, I’m sure.

Here’s a work of solace and consolation: Robert Moran’s “Trinity Requiem” (2011), named for Trinity Wall Street, the so-called “Ground Zero church” in Lower Manhattan, composed to mark the attacks’ tenth anniversary:

The horror and surreality of the day are perfectly reflected in Gloria Coates’ String Quartet No. 8 (2001-02), with its eerie approximations not only of plane engines but also a kind of emotional instability. I know it gives me a sinking feeling, and that’s pretty much how it was to experience 9/11. If you’re looking for solace, do not go here:

Kevin Puts processes expectancy, uncertainty, and hope in his Symphony No. 2 (2002):

Dona nobis pacem.

September 11, 2020