Gloria Coates (néeKannenberg; October 10, 1933[a] – August 19, 2023) was an American composer who lived inMunich from 1969 until her death. She trained and worked also as actress, stage director, singer, author and painter. She is known for her many symphonies, and also wrotechamber music, and vocal music for large and small ensembles. Her compositions have been performed internationally and recorded by notable orchestras. She ran a concert series for new music in Munich. Her First Symphony "Music on Open Strings" was played at the 1978Warsaw Autumn and was the first composition by a woman in themusica viva series ofBayerischer Rundfunk.
Gloria Kannenberg was born inWausau, Wisconsin, on October 10, 1933;[3] her mother was Natalie Kannenberg, an Italian singer, and her father was Robert Kannenberg, an American politician of German descent.[2] She began improvising and composing as a child, guided by her mother. From age seven, she took piano lessons and later also voice lessons from Elizabeth Silverthorn, music director at the local Episcopal Church. She achieved a composition prize from theNational Federation of Music Clubs[1] for one of her songs, to a text that she wrote herself, at age 14.[2] She met composerAlexander Tcherepnin in 1952, who encouraged her and gave her private lessons, and whose summer courses at the SalzburgMozarteum she attended in 1962.[1] She married Francis M. Coates, an attorney, in 1959.[4]
Coates then studied at different universities and the Cooper Union Art School, achieving a bachelor's degree in drama and painting in 1963, and in composition and singing the same year. She became a Master of Music in composition in 1965, and took post-graduate studies in composition withOtto Luening atColumbia University in 1967 and 1968.[1] She also studied withJack Beeson.[5]
Her early works were performed in the 1960s inBaton Rouge, Louisiana, and in New York City.[2] She worked in Chicago, New York and Louisiana as a singer, actress, drama director, author and painter.[1]
In 1969, Coates travelled to Germany on a freighter, together with her small daughter, to study singingLieder in Stuttgart. Stopping in Munich, she had a skiing accident that injured her spine. From 1971 she focused on composition,[1] although knowing that it was harder than painting and acting.[3] She ran a concert series in Munich, entitled German-American Music, from 1971 to 1984.[1] Her works were performed at the 1972Darmstädter Ferienkurse.[1]
Coates had a breakthrough with her First Symphony, subtitled "Music on Open Strings", composed in 1973 for astring orchestra tuned differently.[3] It was played at the 1978Warsaw Autumn festival and was the work discussed most. It was a finalist in the 1986 Koussevitzky competition, and was the first composition by a woman in themusica viva concert series ofBayerischer Rundfunk.[4] Her works were also performed at theDresdner Musikfestspiele, and the festivalNew Music America.
Coates died from pancreatic cancer in Munich on August 19, 2023, at the age of 89.[3][5][6][7]
Coates composed symphonies, chamber music for different ensembles, vocal music and multimedia works. She experimented with vocal works for many voices.[2] She set texts to music byEmily Dickinson, and her own daughter, Alexandra. She said that her music is serious, not funny, because she experienced sadness in her childhood, making her cheerful but with a serious unconscious side." Coates is credited as the most prolific female symphony composer.[3]
Coates commented her symphonies in an interview: "I thought, 'That's really gutsy of me to call it a symphony'. I always had an idea of symphonies being in the 19th century, somehow. I never set out to write a symphony as such. It has to do with the intensity of what I'm trying to say and the fact that it took 48 different instrumental lines to say it, and that the structures I was using had evolved over many years. I couldn't call it a little name."[8]
As interviewer Trevor Hunter noted:
For Gloria Coates, artistic expression is a spiritual necessity. She has great interest and significant participation in painting, architecture, theater, poetry, and singing—but it is through composing that she taps into a wellspring of abstracted emotionality that the others cannot reach. Whatever the veiled expressions of her work may be, there is an undoubted emotional richness present, which if not concretely knowable is at least viscerally felt by the audience. Canons constructed ofquartertones andglissandos evoke gloomy instability, but also unearthly beauty.[9]
Mark Swed wrote that "Coates is a master ofmicrotones, of taking a listener to aural places you never knew could exist and finding the mystical spaces between tones."[10]Kyle Gann described in liner notes to one of her albums:
Behind the variety of such techniques, behind even the varying deployment of similar structures, one hears Coates's constant aesthetic: her sense of each movement as a unified gesture, her almost post-minimalist unidirectionality. Above all, while sadness, anger and mysticism appear in her work with stylized clarity, they are subsumed to an overarching tranquility that often has the last word, and always the most important one.[11]
Besides composing, Gloria Coates also paintedabstract expressionistic paintings that were often used as the covers for her albums.[12] In her paintings, complementary colors such as red and green, yellow and blue, interact, in a manner of swirls of colours reminiscent of the style ofVincent van Gogh. She painted colourful works, applying paint in energetic strokes.[3]
Symphony No. 15, 2007, Cantata da Requiem (1972), Transitions (1984) (Naxos 8.559371); Passau Festival, Teri Dunn (soprano) / Talisker Players, Ars Nova Ensemble Nuremberg/Heider,Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra,Michael Boder, cond.
Class Of '38, Symphony No. 15/3 "What Are Stars" (Naxos 8.557087)[16]
Symphony No. 16, 1995 (live) 25 Years Das Neue Werk Hamburg, Das Neue Werk, Dieter Cichewiecz, cond. cpo 999 590-2
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