Charles Wuorinen

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Charles Peter Wuorinen (born June 9, 1938) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. His collection of more than 270 compositions includes works for orchestra, opera, and chamber music, as well as solo instrumental and vocal performances.

Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx have collaborated with him.

Wuorinen's work has been described as serialist, but he has come to dismiss the word as meaningless.

Personal life

Wuorinen lived in New York City and the Long Valley section of Washington Township, New Jersey, for the past two years. Howard Stokar, his longtime partner and boss, was married to him.

Wuorinen died in New York on March 11, 2020, at the age of 81, as a result of injuries sustained in a fall in the preceding September.

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Life and career

Wuorinen was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan's Manhattan. John H. Wuorinen, the chairman of Columbia University's history department, was a noted Scandinavian scholar who also worked for the Office of Strategic Services and wrote five books about his native Finland. Alfhild Kalijarvi, his mother's son, received her M.A. Smith College undergraduate biology major John Smith. Wuorinen excelled academically, graduating from Trinity School (New York City) as a valedictorian in 1956; he later earned a B.A. (1961) and an M.A. Columbia University (1963) major in music. Jacques Barzun and Edgard Varèse were among the early supporters.

Wuorinen began writing at the age of 5 and started playing piano lessons at 6. He received the Young Composers' Award at the New York Philharmonic and the John Harms Chorus premiered his choral work O Filii et Filiae at Town Hall on May 2, 1954. He performed as a pianist and pianist with the choruses at the Church of the Reign and Transfiguration (Little Church Around the Corner), and he was the rehearsal pianist for Carlos Chávez's opera Panfilo and Lauretta at Columbia University in the spring of 1957. Wuorinen, president of Trinity School Glee Club from 1952 to 1956. In 1956–57, he served as pianist, librarian, and general manager of the Columbia University Orchestra. He was the organist at Saint Paul's Church in Gardner, Massachusetts, where his parents lived during the summer months. He has been given the Bearns Prize three times, the BMI Student Composers Award four times, and the Lili Boulanger Award. For many years, he served as a member of the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East. Several early professional performances of Wuorinen's compositions were performed on the Music of Our Time program at the 92nd Street Y run by violinist Max Pollikoff.

The Group for Contemporary Music was established in 1962 by Wuorinen and fellow composer-performer Harvey Sollberger. The ensemble raised the baron of new music performance in New York by championing composers such as Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Stefan Wolpe, who wrote many works for the ensemble. Many of Wuorinen's works were premiered by The Group, including Chamber Concerto for Cello and the Chamber Concerto for Flute. The orchestral and Electronic Exchanges, premiered by Lukas Foss; the First Piano Concerto, with composer John Lilly; and Wuorinen's only purely electronic work, composed using the RCA Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center on a grant from Nonesuch Records, for which Wuorinen was named a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1970, are among Wuorinen's major Wuorinen compositions from the 1970, Wuorinen was hired to teach at Columbia in 1964 and promoted to assistant professor in 1969, the year he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant; during this time, he served as visiting lecturer at Princeton University (1968–71), and the University of South Florida (1971).

Wuorinen, a violinist who taught at the Manhattan School of Music from 1971 to 1979, had a fruitful 1970s. Chamber's most notable works for the Tashi Ensemble, Tashi and Fortune include his first two string quartets, the Six Pieces for Violin and Piano, Fast Fantasy for cello and piano, and two large commissions for Violin and Piano. Grand Bamboula for strings, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, the elder master's last sketches, and Amplified Violin and Orchestra, which caused a controversy at the Tanglewood Festival with Paul Zukofsky and the BSO conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, among other works for orchestra. Wuorinen completed his Percussion Symphony, a five-movement piece for 24 players starring two pianos for the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble and his longtime colleague Raymond Des Roches, as well as his opera subtitled "a baroque burlesque" in 1976 with Renaud Charles Bruce's original libretto. In addition to the Percussion Symphony, the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble had performed and recorded Wuorinen's composition "Ringing Changes" in collaboration with the Group for Contemporary Music, setting the scene for this exciting larger-scale work. The Percussion Symphony, composed by Raymond Des Roches, was released by Nonesuch in 1978. Wuorinen became involved in the work of mathematologist Benoit Mandelbrot, and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation he carried out sonic experiments at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the late 1970s. Wuorinen is quoted as saying: In an interview with Richard Burbank, Wuorinen is quoted as saying: "It's a good thing that I'm talking about."

Two large-scale works for chorus and orchestra based on Biblical texts, the 60-minute oratorio The Handel Oratorio Society in Rock Island, Illinois, 1980-1989), and the Minnesota Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony jointly commissioned the Handel Oratorio Society in 1980 and Genesis (1989). The Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra; the Third Piano Concerto, written for pianist Garrick Ohlsson; Moves and Shakers, the first work in Cleveland Orchestra for music director Christoph von Dohnányi; and The Golden Dance are among the major orchestral performances of this period; Wuorinen was composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony from 1984 to 1989. His Third String Quartet was commissioned by the Library of Congress to celebrate pianist Ursula Oppens' 25th birthday, the Sonata for Violin and Piano, third piano sonata for Alan Feinberg, and trios for various combinations, including three works for horn trios. Wuorinen's longtime collaborator and champion Fred Sherry, who performed at Amplified Cello and Orchestra), became an audience member and mentor in the 1980s, as well as three works based on Mozart's bicentennial and commissioned in honor of the Mozart's bicentennial and inspired by scenes from Dante's Mission of Virgil (The River of Light). Wuorinen's watercolors were influenced by William Blake's Dante texts. Wuorinen's Variations for Orchestra (Schoenberg) choreographed by Richard Tanner, and Martins created a ballet based on Wuorinen's A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. A MacArthur Foundation Fellowship was given to Wuorinen in 1985.

Wuorinen began focusing on writing for voice, including Dylan Thomas's A Winter's Tale for soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Fenton Songs I & II on poems by British poet James Fenton, with whom Wuorinen was collaborating on an opera. The Saxophone Quartet, Percussion Quartet, Piano Quintet, and Sonata for Guitar and Piano were among the major chamber works performed. The Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra, Symphony Seven, as well as the New York City Ballet's Dante works were among orchestral works.

James Levine, a major promoter of Wuorinen's music, has been active in the 21st century. The Metropolitan Orchestra Orchestra premiered Wuorinen's Fourth Piano Concerto in his first season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Levine's tone poem Theologoumenon (a 60th birthday gift to Levine from his longtime manager Ronald Wilford) premiered by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; and the BSO's Eighth Symphony: Theologoumenon. Levine conducted two performances of Wuorinen's Ashberyana at the Guggenheim Museum in honor of Wuorinen's 70th birthday.

Peter Serkin, for whom Wuorinen created three concerts including Time Regained (based on Machaut, Matteo da Perugia, Guillaume Dufay, and Orlando Gibbons), and Flying to Kahani; and Second Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet, another ensemble with whom Wuorinen has had a fruitful relationship and for which he wrote his Fourth String Quartet, are two of Wuorinen's music. In 2004, the New York City Opera premiered Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on Salman Rushdie's book, with a libretto by James Fenton. Fenton Songs I and II, two other song cycles based on Fenton's poetry, were released around this time. Cyclops 2000 for Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta; Ashberyana, John Ashbery's setting of poetry; and It Happens Like This, a dramatic cantata by James Tate premiered at Tanglewood with the composer conducting.

Wuorinen produced the opera Brokeback Mountain between 2008 and 2012, based on Annie Proulx's brief story of the same name and with a libretto adapted by Proulx. It premiered at the Real in Madrid on January 28, 2014, to mixed reviews.

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