Elie Siegmeister

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Elie Siegmeister (b. January 15, 1909, New York City – March 10, 1991, Manhasset, New York) was an American composer, educator and author.

His varied musical output showed his concern with the development of an authentic American musical vocabulary. Jazz, blues and folk melodies and rhythms are frequent themes in his many song cycles, his nine operas, his eight symphonies, and his many choral, chamber, and solo works. His 37 orchestral works have been performed by leading orchestras throughout the world under such conductors as Toscanini, Stokowski, Mitropoulos, Lorin Maazel, and Sergiu Comissiona. He also composed for Hollywood (notably, the film score of "They Came to Cordura," starring Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth, 1959) and Broadway ("Sing Out, Sweet Land," 1944, book by Walter Kerr).

Siegmeister wrote a number of important books on music, among them "Treasury of American Song" (Knopf, 1940-43, text coauthored with Olin Downs, music arranged by Siegmeister), second edition revised and enlarged (Consolidated Music Publishers); "The Music Lover's Handbook" (William Morrow, 1943; Book-of-the-Month Club selection), revised and expanded as "The New Music Lover's Handbook" (1973); and the two-colume "Harmony and Melody" (Wadsworth, 1985), which was widely adopted by college and conservatory curricula.

From 1977 until his death, he served on the Board of Directors of ASCAP and chaired its Symphony and Concert Committee. Among his signal achievements, he was composer-in-residence at Hofstra University 1966-76, having organized and conducted the Hofstra Symphony Orchestra; established 1971 and chaired the Council of Creative Artists, Libraries, and Museums; and initiated 1978 the Kennedy Center's National Black Music competition. In 1939, he organized the American Ballad Singers, pioneers in the folk music renaissance whom he conducted for eight years in performances throughout the United States. He was the winner of numerous awards and commissions, among them those of the Guggenheim, Ford, and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundations, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the USIA.

Siegmeister earned a B.A. cum laude at the age of 18 from Columbia University, where he had studied music theory with Seth Bingham. He studied conducting with Albert Stoessel at the Juilliard School and counterpoint with Wallingford Riegger. He was among the numerous American composers, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein and others, who were students of the influential teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The best known of his own students was Stephen Albert (1941-92), winner of a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for music. Other students included clarinetist Naomi Drucker and composers Michael Shapiro, Daniel Dorff, and Leonard J. Lehrman.