Richard Edward Wilson - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Richard Edward Wilson 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...

of orchestra

Orchestra

An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...

l, 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...

tic, instrumental

Instrumental

An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics or singing, although it might include some non-articulate vocal input; the music is primarily or exclusively produced by musical instruments....

, 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...

. Wilson was born in Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...

, where he was at a young age drawn to the concerts of George Szell

George Szell

George Szell , originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer...

and the Cleveland Orchestra

Cleveland Orchestra

The Cleveland Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Cleveland, Ohio. It is one of the five American orchestras informally referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1918, the orchestra plays most of its concerts at Severance Hall...

. In 1963, Wilson graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa

Phi Beta Kappa Society

The Phi Beta Kappa Society is an academic honor society. Its mission is to "celebrate and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences"; and induct "the most outstanding students of arts and sciences at America’s leading colleges and universities." Founded at The College of William and...

from 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...

, where he studied with Robert Moevs

Robert Moevs

Robert Walter Moevs was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was known for his highly chromatic music....

and Randall Thompson

Randall Thompson

Randall Thompson was an American composer, particularly noted for his choral works.-Career:He attended Harvard University, became assistant professor of music and choir director at Wellesley College, and received a doctorate in music from the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music...

. He later received an MA from Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. He is currently Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music at Vassar College

Vassar College

Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...

, where he has taught since 1966. Since 1992 he has been composer-in-residence with the American Symphony Orchestra

American Symphony Orchestra

The American Symphony Orchestra is a New York-based American orchestra founded in 1962 by Leopold Stokowski, then aged 80. Following Maestro Stokowski's departure, Kazuyoshi Akiyama was appointed Music Director of the American Symphony Orchestra from 1973-1978. Music Directors during the early...

.

Richard Wilson's compositions are marked by a stringent yet lyrical atonality which often sets him apart from the established schools of modern American music: minimalism

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...

, twelve-tone, neo-romanticism

Neo-romanticism

The term neo-romanticism is used to cover a variety of movements in music, painting and architecture. It has been used with reference to very late 19th century and early 20th century composers such as Gustav Mahler particularly by Carl Dahlhaus who uses it as synonymous with late Romanticism...

, and avant-garde

Avant-garde

Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

. Two of his works, Eclogue

Eclogue

An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...

for solo piano, and his String Quartet

String quartet

A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...

No. 3, are considered triumphs of twentieth century American music. His large-scale orchestral works include the Symphony

Symphony

A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...

No. 1, premiered by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic

Hudson Valley Philharmonic

The Hudson Valley Philharmonic is a symphony orchestra based in Poughkeepsie, New York in the United States. The Hudson Valley Philharmonic also known as HVP began in 1932 and it serves the Hudson Valley region....

and recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is the national orchestra of New Zealand. It is a crown entity owned by the Government of New Zealand, with 90 full-time players....

; Articulations, written for the San Francisco Symphony

San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony is an orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980, the orchestra has performed at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus are part of the organization...

. Wilson is also the composer of the one-act whimsical opera, Æthelred the Unready, based on the exploits of the ill-advised Saxon

Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...

king, Ethelred II of England.

He classified the three types of irregular resolutions of dominant seventh chords.

Critical response

Wilson has been praised by 21st Century Music as a "splendidly talented and highly accomplished composer whose music rewards seeking out" and by the New York Sun

New York Sun

The New York Sun was a weekday daily newspaper published in New York City from 2002 to 2008. When it debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of an otherwise unrelated earlier New York paper, The Sun , it became the first general-interest broadsheet newspaper to be started...

as "possessed of a hard-won idiom that has grown and developed over the years into a probing blend of wit, classic form, modern harmony, and impressionistic color."

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

has called his String Quartet No. 3 a "richly wrought and unusual composition," http://faculty.vassar.edu/riwilson/compositions/StringQuartetNo_3.pdf while the New York Times has deemed it "a work of substance and expressivity ... [that] merits a place in the active repertory."

In a review of a recent concert, Bernard Holland

Bernard Holland

Bernard Holland is an internationally recognized American music critic. He served on the staff of The New York Times from 1981 until 2008 and held the post of chief music critic from 1995, contributing 4,575 articles to the newspaper....

of the New York Times wrote, "Richard Wilson's Diablerie

Diablerie

In the context of White Wolf Game Studio's vampire books and role-playing games from the World of Darkness, diablerie takes place when a vampire drinks not only all the blood of another vampire but also their soul, generally in order to increase their own powers...

http://faculty.vassar.edu/riwilson/compositions/Diablerie.pdf stood apart, contemporary in its vocabulary and grammar but pursuing always the long, lyrical, sometimes operatically expressive lines and Romantic-era concerto writing." A review in Strings Magazine heralded the same composition as "another gem in Wilson's mélange of solo pieces."

Honors

In 2004 Wilson received an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from which he previously received the Walter Hinrichsen Award. Other recent honors include: the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; 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...

; the Cleveland Arts Prize; residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation and the Bellagio Center in Italy; and commissions from the Koussevitsky and Fromm Foundations, Chamber Music America, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

, and the San Francisco Symphony

San Francisco Symphony

Discography

Richard Wilson: Diablerie Albany Records TROY 773
Richard Wilson: String Quartets Albany Records TROY 573
Richard Wilson: Aethelred the Unready Albany Records TROY 512
Richard Wilson: Affirmations Albany Records TROY 389
Richard Wilson: Symphony No. 1 Koch International Classics/ Peermusic Classical
http://www.albanyrecords.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=AR&Product_Code=TROY333&Category_Code=VCN&Search=richard+wilson&Offset=&filter_cat=&exclude_word=&the_fieldlist=g.SRCH_CODE|g.SRCH_NAME|g.SRCH_PRICE|g.SRCH_COMPOSER|g.SRCH_CONTENTS&range_low=&range_high=&dopowersearch=1&SRCH_CATEGORY_HF=&PowerSearch_Begin_Only=Stresses in the Peaceable Kingdom: The Choral Music of Richard Wilson] Albany Records TROY 333
Richard Wilson: Chamber Music Albany Records TROY 074
Richard Wilson: String Quartet No. 3, Eclogue, et al. CRI/ New World Records NWCR602
Richard Wilson: Bassoon Concerto CRI/ New World Records NWCR575
Richard Wilson: Piano Concerto CRI/ New World Records NWCR618

External links

Richard Wilson Homepage
Vassar College-- Richard Wilson, bio
Peermusic Classical: Richard Wilson Composer's Publisher and Bio
Discography

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Critical response

Honors

Orchestra

Works for mixed ensemble

Works for string quartet

Works for solo piano

Works for solo instruments

Works for voice

Works for choir

Concert band

Discography

External links