Gloria Coates

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Gloria Coates (October 10, 1938 in Wausau, Wisconsin) is an American composer who lives in Europe. She studied with Alexander Tcherepnin, Otto Luening, and Jack Beeson.

Her music features canonic structures and prominent, sometimes exclusive, glissandos, being "characterized by extremely strict, even rigid technical procedures (canonic structures), which are often worked out with unusual musical materials (glissandi)" (Schubert ?). Though often compared to early Iannis Xenakis and Penderecki due to her modernistic sound and use of glissandos, her music is more accurately described as postminimalist or 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" (ibid). Kyle Gann describes her as his favorite woman symphonist.

Her best known work is Music on Open Strings.