Gloria Coates is an American

United States

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

 composer who has moved to, and has subsequently been living in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

, 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...

 since 1969. She studied with Alexander Tcherepnin

Alexander Tcherepnin

Alexander Nikolayevich Tcherepnin was a Russian-born composer and pianist. His father, Nikolai Tcherepnin and his son, Ivan Tcherepnin were also composers, as are two of his grandsons, Sergei and Stefan. His son Serge was involved in the roots of electronic music and instruments...

, Otto Luening

Otto Luening

Otto Clarence Luening was a German-American composer and conductor, and an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music....

, and Jack Beeson

Jack Beeson

Jack Beeson was an American composer. He was known particularly for his operas, the best known of which are Lizzie Borden, Hello Out There! and The Sweet Bye and Bye.-Biography:...

.

Her music features canonic

Canon (music)

In music, a canon is a contrapuntal composition that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration . The initial melody is called the leader , while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower...

 structures and prominent, sometimes exclusive, glissando

Glissando

In music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. In some contexts it is distinguished from the continuous portamento...

s, being "characterized by extremely strict, even rigid technical procedures (canonic structures), which are often worked out with unusual musical materials (glissandi)". Her music is postminimalist, marked by the tension "not only between material and technique (...an attempt to give structure to chaos), but even more so between what would have to be termed 'sober-technical' compositional principles and the genuine direct expressive power and emotionality of the music".

"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 of quartertone

Quarter tone

A quarter tone , is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale, an interval about half as wide as a semitone, which is half a whole tone....

s and glissandos evoke gloomy instability, but also unearthly beauty." http://www.newmusicbox.org/cover.nmbx

Besides composing, Gloria Coates also paints abstract expressionistic paintings which are often used as the cover image for her albums. Her paintings, just like her music, are often full of imagination, colour, and rigour. One is often struck by the richness in colours in her paintings such as in her "Sounding Rounds" (Oil on canvas, 1991) where different colours of circles intersect and overlay one another. Complementary colours such as red and green, yellow and blue, interact and mix with one another in the small strokes. The painterly manner, with layers of swirls of colours, is reminiscent of the style of the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh. Just like Vincent Van Gogh's painting, Gloria Coates's music is probably ahead of her time as pieces like String Quartet No. 3, 4 that are composed in the 1970s, are rather experimental and unusual for that era (and perhaps still so today).

As it is so aptly described by Kyle Gann in one of her albums with regards to Gloria Coates's Music, "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."

In the article "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim" by Kyle Gann, Gloria Coates was crowned, "the greatest woman symphonist," for her passionate pursuit and persistence in a domain that is dominated by men. However, this ambitious pursuit to be a woman symphonist has not been a conscious effort to set herself apart from the other female composers, instead in an interview she commented that it came through a natural manifestation trying to convey something deep within her. "When I did, I thought, 'That's really gutsy of me to call it a 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...

,'" she said from her home in Munich (see neo-Romanticism

Neoromanticism (music)

Neoromanticism in music is a return to the emotional expression associated with nineteenth-century Romanticism. Since the mid-1970s the term has come to be identified with neoconservative postmodernism, especially in Germany, Austria, and the United States, with composers such as Wolfgang Rihm and...

).

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.

Her best known work is Music on Open Strings.

Chronological List of works

• 1950
  • The Sighing Wind

• 1961
  • Sylken
  • Te Deum
  • Dies Sanctificatus
  • Thieves' Carnival
  • The Rainy Day
  • Twilight

• 1962
  • Sonatina
  • Trio for Piano, Flute and Oboe
  • Glissando String Quartet
  • Everyman. Morality Play
  • Five Abstractions

• 1963
  • Rondo for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Tambourine and Field Drum
  • O Sing Unto the Lord a New Song

• 1964
  • Interlude for Organ
  • Mathematical Equations
  • Missa Brevis
  • Overture to Saint Joan
  • Saint Joan
  • String Quartet with Provincial Drum

• 1964/65
  • Hamlet
  • Ophelias Lieder

• 1962/66
  • Fall of the House of Usher

• 1966
  • String Quartet No.1
  • Trio for Three Flutes

• 1971
  • We Have Ears and Hear Not Point Counterpoint

• 1965/72
  • I'm Nobody from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1966/72
  • I´ve Seen a Dying Eye from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"
  • I Held a Jewel in my Fingers from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1971/72
  • Wild Nights from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1972
  • Mobile for String Quartet
  • String Quartet No.2
  • "Eine Stimme ruft elektronische Klänge auf"
  • Naturstimme und elektronische Klangbänder. Vocal Multiphonics and Modulator
  • Armistice from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1972/73
  • Natural Voice and Electronic Modulator
  • Cantata da Requiem 'WW II Poems for Peace'
  • Tones in Overtones
  • Fragment from Leonardo's Notebooks "Anima della Terra" Vita

• 1973
  • Symphony No.1 Music on open Strings

• 1974
  • Planets
  • Halley's Comet
  • May the Morning Star Rise

• 1975
  • Five Abstractions of the Poems by Emily Dickinson for Woodwind Quartet Five Pieces for four Woodwinds
  • Fragment from Leonardo's Notebooks "The Elements"
  • Neptune Odyssey
  • String Quartet No.3
  • Variations on "Lo! How a Rose"
  • Memories of Childhood
  • My Country Tis of Thee
  • Textures and Shades of E.D.
  • The Tune without the Words

• 1976
  • From a Poetry Album

• 1976/77
  • String Quartet No.4

• 1978
  • Symphony No.3 Symphony Nocturne
  • Six Movements for String Quartet
  • Ecology 1
  • Ecology 2
  • Between
  • The Beatitudes

• 1979
  • A Word is Dead from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1980
  • Valse triste
  • Mine by the Right from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"
  • Bind Me, I Still Can Sing from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"
  • If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"
  • Now I Lay Thee Down / On the Death of a Child from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1974/82
  • Sinfonietta della Notte

• 1976/82
  • Fragment from Leonardo's Notebooks "Fonte di Rimini" Sinfonia Brevis
  • Spring Morning in Grobholz' Garden

• 1982
  • Go the Great Way
  • Colony Air

• 1982/84
  • Will There Really be a "Morning"? from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1984
  • Transitions
  • In Falling Timbers Buried from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1985
  • Choral Symphony No.5 Three Mystical Songs
  • Meteor March

• 1986
  • Music in Microtones

• 1987
  • Resistances
  • Auto-Madic Music
  • Missed

• 1974/88
  • Symphony No.2 Illuminatio in Tenebris, also: 'Music in Abstract Lines'
  • The Force for Peace in War

• 1987/88
  • Lunar Loops

• 1988
  • Breaking Through
  • Fiori alto recorder and tape
  • Fiori and the Princess alto recorder and tape
  • Seven Songs with Poems by Emily Dickinson
  • String Quartet No.5
  • Fiori flute and tape
  • Fiori and the Princess flute and tape
  • Breaking Through II
  • Lichtsplitter for Flute, Harp and Viola
  • Lichtsplitter for Flute, Harp, Viola and 1 Percussionist
  • To Be Free of It
  • Dramatic Scene The Swan
  • Reaching for the Moon

• 1974/89
  • Star Tracks Through Darkness

• 1978/89
  • Five Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson

• 1984/90
  • Symphony No.4 Chiaroscuro

• 1988/91
  • Transfer 482

• 1990/91
  • Symphony No.7 Dedicated to those who brought down the Wall in PEACE

• 1991
  • Indian Sounds
  • Symphony No.8 Indian Sounds
  • Rainbow Across the Night Sky
  • Blue Steel Bent
  • Blue Flowers
  • In the Glacier for 10 flutists and percussion
  • Wir Tönen Allein
  • Cette Blanche Agonie

• 1992
  • Royal Anthem Königshymne
  • Ungeziefer Insects
  • In the Mt. Tremper Zen Monastery

• 1992/93
  • Night Music

• 1993
  • Castles in the Air
  • Im Finstern sei des Geistes Licht und Sonne
  • Olympic Roller Blading
  • Vitality, Begun from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"
  • Bride of the Holy Ghost from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1988/94
  • Time Frozen
  • Symphony No.6 Time Frozen
  • Blue Monday
  • Sperriges Morgen

• 1993/94
  • The Quinces' Quandery: Homage to Van Gogh
  • Symphony No.9 The Quinces Quandary
  • Symphony No.10 Drones of Druids on Celtic Ruins

• 1995
  • Turning to

• 1996
  • Lyric Suite
  • Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Hommage a Novalis

• 1997
  • Fairytale Suite Märchen Suite
  • Floating Down the Mississippi

• 1965-98
  • 15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson

• 1984/98
  • After Great Pain from "15 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson"

• 1998
  • Ode to the Moon

• 1998/99
  • Symphony No.11

• 1999
  • Einsamkeit
  • Komplementär

• 2000
  • String Quartet No.6
  • Im Ausland

• 2000/01
  • Symphony No.12
  • Symphony No.13
  • Sonata for Violin Solo

• 2001
  • String Quartet No.7

• 2001/02
  • String Quartet No.8
  • Sonata for Piano No.2

• 2002
  • Prayers without Words

• 2003
  • Lyric Suite No.2
  • Mirage
  • Symphony No.14

• 2004/05
  • Symphony No.15

Compiled: February–April 2003
Last update: September 9, 2007

This list of compositions is based on the "Werkverzeichnis" compiled by Christa Jost. A further source was Gloria Coates' America Music Center website.

Albums (incomplete)

• Kreutzer Quartet (2002) - Gloria Coates: String Quartets Nos. 1, 5, 6
• Kreutzer Quartet (2003) - Gloria Coates: String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8 (2003)
• (2006) - Gloria Coates: Symphonies Nos. 1, 7 & 14 (Naxos 8559289)
• Symphony No. 15(2004–2005), Catata da Requiem(1972), Transitions(1984)

Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Boder Talisker Players, Ars Nova Nuremberg, Heider

External links

• Gloria Coates' website
• Gloria Coates' bio from Naxos
• "My most sincere search for the truth" An Interview with Gloria Coates by Robert Burns Neveldine (archive.org link used; original currently unavailable)
• Sequenza 21: Electronic Dialogues/14 Gloria Coates Interview
• Gloria Coates: Beyond the Spheres Published: August 1, 2008 In conversation with Trevor Hunter At the home of Catherine Luening
• Interview with Gloria Coates by Bruce Duffie, May 19, 1995
• Classical Archives Interview