Ingolf Dahl
Encyclopedia
Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator.
, Germany
to a German father and a Swedish mother, his birth name was Walter Ingolf Marcus. He studied with Philipp Jarnach
at the Hochschule für Musik Köln
(1930–32). Leaving Germany where the Nazi Party
was coming to power, he continued his studies at the University of Zürich
with Volkmar Andreae
and Walter Frey. Living with relatives and working at the Zurich Opera
for more than six years, he rose from an internship to the rank of assistant conductor. He served as a vocal coach and chorus master for the world premieres of Alban Berg's
Lulu
and Paul Hindemith's
Mathis der Maler
.
After Switzerland became hostile to Jewish refugees and his role at the Opera was restricted to playing in the orchestra, Dahl emigrated to the United States in 1939. There he used the name Ingolf Dahl, based on his original middle name and his mother's maiden name. He consistently lied about his background, claiming to be of Swedish birth and denying his Jewish heritage. He claimed to have emigrated a year earlier than he actually had. He settled in Los Angeles
and joined the community of expatriate musicians that included Ernst Krenek
, Darius Milhaud
, Arnold Schoenberg
, Igor Stravinsky
, and Ernst Toch
. He had a varied musical career as a solo pianist, keyboard performer (piano and harpsichord), accompanist, conductor, coach, composer, and critic. He produced a performing translation of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire
in English and translated, either alone or with a collaborator, such works as Stravinsky's Poetics of Music. He performed many of Stravinsky's works and the composer was impressed enough to contract Dahl to create a two-piano version of his Danses concertantes and program notes for other works. In 1947, with Joseph Szigeti
he produced a reconstruction of Bach's Violin Concerto in D Minor.
He also worked in the entertainment industry, touring as pianist to Edgar Bergen and his puppets in 1941 and later for comedian Gracie Fields
in 1942 and 1956. He produced musical arrangements for Tommy Dorsey
and served as arranger/conductor to Victor Borge
. He gave private lessons in the classical repertoire to Benny Goodman
as well. He performed on keyboard instruments in the soundtrack orchestras for many films at Fox, Goldwyn Studios
, Columbia
, Universal
, MGM
, and Warner Bros.
, as well as the post-production company Todd-AO
. He also worked on the television show The Twilight Zone
. Though grateful for the income this work provided, he complained while working on Spartacus how pointless it was "to tinkle a few notes on the celeste" when the notes are also doubled by several other instruments, all for a passage presented to the audience under sound effects and actors' voices. Dahl conducted the soundtrack to The Abductors (1957) by his pupil Paul Glass
and performed the second movement of Beethoven's
Pathétique Sonata
in the 1969 animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown
.
Among his compositions, the most frequently performed is the Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Orchestra commissioned and premiered by Sigurd Raschèr
in 1949. He later completed commissions for the Los Angeles Philharmonic
and the Koussevitsky and Fromm foundations. His final work, complete and partly orchestrated at his death in 1970, was the Elegy Concerto for violin and chamber orchestra. In 1999, one critic reviewing a recording of Dahl's works called him a "spiffy composer," "a cross between Stravinsky and Hindemith."
He legally changed his name to Ingolf Dahl in February 1943 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September of that year. In 1945 he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California
in Los Angeles
, where he taught for the rest of his life. In 1952 he was appointed the first head of the Tanglewood
Study Group, a program that targeted not professionals but "the intelligent amateur and music enthusiast, also the general music student and music educator." His most prominent students included the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas
and composer David Cope
.
Among Dahl's honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship
in music composition in 1951, two Huntington Hartford Fellowships, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Southern California, the ASCAP Stravinsky Award, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.
He died in Frutigen
, Switzerland
on August 6, 1970, just a few weeks after the death of his wife on June 10.
, whom he met on a Sierra Club hiking trip.
Notations in his manuscripts show he sometimes found inspiration in his male companions for his compositions. Hymn (1947) was inspired by Dahl's year-long affair with an art student he met at U.S.C.
and movements of A Cycle of Sonnets (1967) carry the initials of two others.
His step-son only learned of his homosexuality in a letter of condolence he received upon Dahl's death. He assessed the relationship between Dahl's private and public sides in these words:
Among Dahl's students are the American conductors Michael Tilson Thomas
, William Hall, William Dehning, Frank A. Salazar, the pianist William Teaford, and the composers Morten Lauridsen
and Lawrence Moss
. Tilson Thomas assessed him this way: "Dahl was an inspiring teacher; over and above the subject matter, he showed his students about the practical value of humanism. that is, how to let humanistic concerns infuse your daily existence."
The Music Library of the University of Southern California holds the Ingolf Dahl Archive. It includes scores, manuscripts, papers, and tapes. Dahl also kept a diary in annual volumes from 1928 until his death in 1970. They are held by his stepson, Antony Linick, who wrote an extensive biography of Ingolf.
The West Coast chapters of the American Musicological Society
present the Ingolf Dahl Memorial Award in Musicology annually.
Biography
Born in HamburgHamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
to a German father and a Swedish mother, his birth name was Walter Ingolf Marcus. He studied with Philipp Jarnach
Philipp Jarnach
Philipp Jarnach was considered in the 1920s to be one of the most important composers of modern music....
at the Hochschule für Musik Köln
Hochschule für Musik Köln
The Cologne University of Music is a music college in Cologne, and Germany's largest academy of music.-History:The academy was founded by Ferdinand Hiller in 1850 as Conservatorium der Musik in Coeln...
(1930–32). Leaving Germany where the Nazi Party
National Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
was coming to power, he continued his studies at the University of Zürich
University of Zurich
The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....
with Volkmar Andreae
Volkmar Andreae
Volkmar Andreae was a Swiss conductor and composer.Andreae was born in Bern. He received piano instruction as a child and his first lessons in composition with Karl Munzinger. From 1897 to 1900, he studied at the Cologne Conservatory and was a student of Fritz Brun, Franz Wüllner, and Friedrich...
and Walter Frey. Living with relatives and working at the Zurich Opera
Zurich Opera
Oper Zürich is an opera company based in Zurich, Switzerland. The company gives performances in the Opernhaus Zürich which has been the company’s home for fifty years.-History:...
for more than six years, he rose from an internship to the rank of assistant conductor. He served as a vocal coach and chorus master for the world premieres of Alban Berg's
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
Lulu
Lulu (opera)
Lulu is an opera by the composer Alban Berg. The libretto was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora .-Composition history:...
and Paul Hindemith's
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.- Biography :Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child...
Mathis der Maler
Mathis der Maler (opera)
Mathis der Maler is an opera by Paul Hindemith. The libretto is also by the composer.The opera's genesis lay in Hindemith's interest in the Protestant Reformation...
.
After Switzerland became hostile to Jewish refugees and his role at the Opera was restricted to playing in the orchestra, Dahl emigrated to the United States in 1939. There he used the name Ingolf Dahl, based on his original middle name and his mother's maiden name. He consistently lied about his background, claiming to be of Swedish birth and denying his Jewish heritage. He claimed to have emigrated a year earlier than he actually had. He settled in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
and joined the community of expatriate musicians that included Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...
, Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
, Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
, Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
, and Ernst Toch
Ernst Toch
Ernst Toch was a composer of classical music and film scores.- Biography :Toch, born in Leopoldstadt, Vienna, into the family of a humble Jewish leather dealer when the city was at its 19th-century cultural zenith, sought throughout his life to introduce new approaches to music...
. He had a varied musical career as a solo pianist, keyboard performer (piano and harpsichord), accompanist, conductor, coach, composer, and critic. He produced a performing translation of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire
Pierrot Lunaire
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire' , commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 , is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg...
in English and translated, either alone or with a collaborator, such works as Stravinsky's Poetics of Music. He performed many of Stravinsky's works and the composer was impressed enough to contract Dahl to create a two-piano version of his Danses concertantes and program notes for other works. In 1947, with Joseph Szigeti
Joseph Szigeti
Joseph Szigeti was a Hungarian violinist.Born into a musical family, he spent his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania. He quickly proved himself to be a child prodigy on the violin, and moved to Budapest with his father to study with the renowned pedagogue Jenő Hubay...
he produced a reconstruction of Bach's Violin Concerto in D Minor.
He also worked in the entertainment industry, touring as pianist to Edgar Bergen and his puppets in 1941 and later for comedian Gracie Fields
Gracie Fields
Dame Gracie Fields, DBE , was an English-born, later Italian-based actress, singer and comedienne and star of both cinema and music hall.-Early life:...
in 1942 and 1956. He produced musical arrangements for Tommy Dorsey
Tommy Dorsey
Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey, Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing", due to his smooth-toned trombone playing. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey...
and served as arranger/conductor to Victor Borge
Victor Borge
Victor Borge ,born Børge Rosenbaum, was a Danish comedian, conductor and pianist, affectionately known as The Clown Prince of Denmark,The Unmelancholy Dane,and The Great Dane.-Early life and career:...
. He gave private lessons in the classical repertoire to Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman was an American jazz and swing musician, clarinetist and bandleader; widely known as the "King of Swing".In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in America...
as well. He performed on keyboard instruments in the soundtrack orchestras for many films at Fox, Goldwyn Studios
Goldwyn Pictures
Goldwyn Pictures Corporation was an American motion picture production company founded in 1916 by Samuel Goldfish in partnership with Broadway producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn using an amalgamation of both last names to create the name...
, Columbia
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
, Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
, MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...
, and Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
, as well as the post-production company Todd-AO
Todd-AO
Todd-AO is a post-production company founded in 1953, providing sound-related services to the motion picture and television industries. The company operates three facilities in the Los Angeles area.-History:...
. He also worked on the television show The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone is an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling. Each episode is a mixture of self-contained drama, psychological thriller, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, or horror, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist...
. Though grateful for the income this work provided, he complained while working on Spartacus how pointless it was "to tinkle a few notes on the celeste" when the notes are also doubled by several other instruments, all for a passage presented to the audience under sound effects and actors' voices. Dahl conducted the soundtrack to The Abductors (1957) by his pupil Paul Glass
Paul Glass
-Biography:Born in Los Angeles, California, Glass was the son of silent film actor and film executive Gaston Glass. He was educated at the University of Southern California , and was taught by Ingolf Dahl, and Goffredo Petrassi in Rome...
and performed the second movement of Beethoven's
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
Pathétique Sonata
Piano Sonata No. 8 (Beethoven)
Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique, was written in 1798 when the composer was 27 years old, and was published in 1799. Beethoven dedicated the work to his friend Prince Karl von Lichnowsky...
in the 1969 animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown
A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969 film)
A Boy Named Charlie Brown is a 1969 animated film, produced by Cinema Center Films, distributed by National General Pictures, and directed by Bill Meléndez, it is the first feature film based on the Peanuts comic strip...
.
Among his compositions, the most frequently performed is the Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Orchestra commissioned and premiered by Sigurd Raschèr
Sigurd Raschèr
Sigurd Manfred Raschèr was an American saxophonist of German birth. He became one of the most important figures in the development of the 20th century repertoire for the classical saxophone.-Career in Europe:...
in 1949. He later completed commissions for the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Los Angeles Philharmonic
The Los Angeles Philharmonic is an American orchestra based in Los Angeles, California, United States. It has a regular season of concerts from October through June at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and a summer season at the Hollywood Bowl from July through September...
and the Koussevitsky and Fromm foundations. His final work, complete and partly orchestrated at his death in 1970, was the Elegy Concerto for violin and chamber orchestra. In 1999, one critic reviewing a recording of Dahl's works called him a "spiffy composer," "a cross between Stravinsky and Hindemith."
He legally changed his name to Ingolf Dahl in February 1943 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September of that year. In 1945 he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
in Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
, where he taught for the rest of his life. In 1952 he was appointed the first head of the Tanglewood
Tanglewood
Tanglewood is an estate and music venue in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is the home of the annual summer Tanglewood Music Festival and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, and has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home since 1937. It was the venue of the Berkshire Festival.- History...
Study Group, a program that targeted not professionals but "the intelligent amateur and music enthusiast, also the general music student and music educator." His most prominent students included the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and artistic director of the New World Symphony Orchestra.-Early years:...
and composer David Cope
David Cope
David Cope is an American author, composer, scientist, and professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz...
.
Among Dahl's honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
in music composition in 1951, two Huntington Hartford Fellowships, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Southern California, the ASCAP Stravinsky Award, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.
He died in Frutigen
Frutigen
Frutigen is a municipality in the Bernese Oberland in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. It is the capital of the Frutigen-Niedersimmental administrative district.-History:...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
on August 6, 1970, just a few weeks after the death of his wife on June 10.
Personal life
From his teenage years, Dahl was initially bi-sexual, but from then on "his preference and partiality...remained with men." He kept this secret in his professional relationships, even as he cataloged in his diaries a wide variety of infatuations, affairs, trysts, and relationships. After coming to America, Dahl married Etta Gornick Linick, whom he had met in Zurich. She accepted his homosexuality, helped him to keep it hidden, and shared his affection with a lover Dahl met on a trip to Boston and occasionally visited there. He maintained an intimate, though never exclusive, relationship for the last fifteen years of his life with Bill ColvigWilliam Colvig
William Colvig was an electrician and amateur musician who was the partner for 33 years of composer Lou Harrison, whom he met in San Francisco, California in 1967...
, whom he met on a Sierra Club hiking trip.
Notations in his manuscripts show he sometimes found inspiration in his male companions for his compositions. Hymn (1947) was inspired by Dahl's year-long affair with an art student he met at U.S.C.
and movements of A Cycle of Sonnets (1967) carry the initials of two others.
His step-son only learned of his homosexuality in a letter of condolence he received upon Dahl's death. He assessed the relationship between Dahl's private and public sides in these words:
- His social life and his compositions never seemed to acquire that ease of communication that sustain [sic] many gifted creators, those titans whose ability to tap into the well-springs of their being allow them to produce a copious and enviable body of artistic endeavor. Ingolf labored under levels of repression that were antithetical to such a process. He did not choose to be who he was, nor did he choose to make his true self available to the wider world. He lived and died without the luxury of candor.
Later recognition
Dahl's music has been recorded on the Boston Records, Capstone, Centaur, Chandos, CRI, Crystal, Klavier, Nimbus, and Summit labels.Among Dahl's students are the American conductors Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and artistic director of the New World Symphony Orchestra.-Early years:...
, William Hall, William Dehning, Frank A. Salazar, the pianist William Teaford, and the composers Morten Lauridsen
Morten Lauridsen
Morten Johannes Lauridsen is an American composer. He was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and has been a professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than 30 years.-Biography:Lauridsen was born February 27, 1943, in...
and Lawrence Moss
Lawrence Moss
Lawrence Kenneth Moss is an American composer of contemporary classical music.He holds a B.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.A. from the Eastman School of Music, and a Ph. D...
. Tilson Thomas assessed him this way: "Dahl was an inspiring teacher; over and above the subject matter, he showed his students about the practical value of humanism. that is, how to let humanistic concerns infuse your daily existence."
The Music Library of the University of Southern California holds the Ingolf Dahl Archive. It includes scores, manuscripts, papers, and tapes. Dahl also kept a diary in annual volumes from 1928 until his death in 1970. They are held by his stepson, Antony Linick, who wrote an extensive biography of Ingolf.
The West Coast chapters of the American Musicological Society
American Musicological Society
The American Musicological Society is a membership-based musicological organization founded in 1934 to advance scholarly research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship; it grew out of a small contingent of the Music Teachers National Association and, more directly,...
present the Ingolf Dahl Memorial Award in Musicology annually.
Written works
"Notes on Cartoon Music" in Mervyn Cooke, ed., The Hollywood Film Music Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010)Sources
- Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof (1995)
- Dorothy Lamb Crawford, A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
- Anthony Linick, The Lives of Ingolf Dahl (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2008)
- Halsey Stevens, "In Memoriam: Ingolf Dahl (1912-1970)" in Perspectives of New Music, vol. 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1970), 147-148
- Steve Schwartz, review of "Defining Dahl: The Music of Ingolf Dahl," available on ClassicalNet: Review, accessed June 10, 2010
- Michael Tilson Thomas, "Ingolf Dahl, 1912-1970," in Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1970