Peter Westergaard - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Peter Talbot Westergaard (born 1931) is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

and music theorist. He is Professor Emeritus of music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

Biography

Westergaard was born in 1931 in Champaign, Illinois

Champaign, Illinois

Champaign is a city in Champaign County, Illinois, in the United States. The city is located south of Chicago, west of Indianapolis, Indiana, and 178 miles northeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Though surrounded by farm communities, Champaign is notable for sharing the campus of the University of...

. He pursued undergraduate studies at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, graduating in 1953, and in 1956 obtained an M.F.A.

Master of Fine Arts

A Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...

degree from Princeton University

Princeton University

. He studied with Roger Sessions

Roger Sessions

Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, critic, and teacher of music.-Life:Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendent of Samuel Huntington, a signer of...

, Walter Piston

Walter Piston

Walter Hamor Piston Jr., , was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter....

, 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...

, Edward Cone, Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt

Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.-Biography:...

and Wolfgang Fortner

Wolfgang Fortner

Wolfgang Fortner was a German composer, composition teacher and conductor.-Life:Fortner was born in Leipzig. From his parents - both singers - Fortner very early on had intense contact with music...

(Pratt 2001) in Freiburg/Germany.

He taught at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, Amherst College

Amherst College

Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...

, and Princeton University

Princeton University

before retiring in 2001. Westergaard continues to be active as a composer, mainly of opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

and chamber music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

Composer and theorist

Amongst former pupils of Babbitt, Westergaard stands out for his contributions to serial theory, as well as for his compositions, which are characterized by a delight in symmetry and mirror relationships, together with a concern for the systematic and integrated use of all the parameters of music, producing multileveled, clear, beautiful, and audible patterns (Griffiths 1981, 160–61).

Operas

Charivari (1953)
Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos (1966)
The Tempest (1994)
Chicken-Little (1997)
Moby Dick: Scenes from an Imaginary Opera (2004)
Alice in Wonderland (2006)

Film version of Alice in Wonderland published by Albany records
http://www.albanyrecords.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=AR&Product_Code=TROY1198

Vocal music

Cantata I: "The Plot Against the Giant" (text: W. Stevens), for female voices, clarinet, harp, and cello (1956)
Cantata II: "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" (text: Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

), for bass and ten instruments (1958)
Cantata III: "Leda and the Swan" (text: William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

), for mezzo soprano, clarinet, viola, vibraphone, and marimba (1961)
Cantata IV: "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" (text: Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...

), for soprano and five instruments (1964)
There Was a Little Man for soprano and violin (1979)
Ariel Music (text: William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, from The Tempest), for soprano and ten instruments (1987)
Ode (text: Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...

), for soprano, flute, clarinet, harp, violin, and viola (1989)
anyone lived in a pretty how town (text: E. E. Cummings
E. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

), for SATB choir (1997)
Cantata V: "'Byzantium' and 'Sailing to Byzantium'" (text: William Butler Yeats), for baritone and percussion quartet (1997)
There Was a Lady Loved a Sow (text: traditional) (1997)
Cantata VI: "To the Dark Lady" (text: William Shakespeare), for soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor, baritone, and percussion duo (1999)

Instrumental music

String Quartet, 1957;
Five Movements, for small orchestra (1958)
Quartet, for clarinet, vibraphone, violin, and cello (1960)
Trio, for flute, cello, and piano (1962)
Variations for Six Players, for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello (1963)
Divertimento on Discobbolic Fragments, for flute and piano (1967)
Noises, Sounds, and Sweet Airs, for ensemble (1968)
Tuckets and Sennets, for band (1969)
Moto perpetuo, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, and horn (1976)
Two Fanfares, for brass (1988)
Ringing Changes, for orchestra (1996)
All Fours, for percussion quartet (1997)

Writings

An Introduction to Tonal Theory
Peter Westergaard's Tonal Theory
Peter Westergaard's tonal theory is the theory of tonal music developed by Peter Westergaard and outlined in Westergaard's 1975 book An Introduction to Tonal Theory...

. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.

Sources

Griffiths, Paul. 1981. Modern Music: The Avant Garde since 1945. New York: George Braziller. ISBN 0-8076-1018-6
Pratt, Michael J. 2001. "Westergaard, Peter (Talbot)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, eited by Stanley Sadie
Stanley Sadie
Stanley Sadie CBE was a leading British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , which was published as the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.Sadie was educated at St Paul's School,...

and John Tyrrell
John Tyrrell (professor of music)
John Tyrrell was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1942. He studied at the universities of Cape Town, Oxford and Brno. In 2000 he was appointed Research Professor at Cardiff University....

. London: Macmillan Publishers.

External links

http://symphonyspace.org/event/2346

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