Tui St. George Tucker

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Tui St. George Tucker (b. Fullerton, California, November 25, 1924; d. Boone, North Carolina, April 21, 2004) was an American composer and recorder player.

She was born in Fullerton, Orange County, California and attended Eagle Rock High School in northeast Los Angeles, California, graduating in 1941. She then attended Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1941 to 1944. She moved to New York in 1946, working as a composer, conductor, and recorder player, and spending most of her professional life in New York City. Her compositions often feature microtonality and are strongly influenced by early music. She developed special recorders with extra holes, as well as special fingerings for the recorder to allow for the playing of quarter tones. Her Indian Summer: Three Microtonal Antiphons on Psalm Texts for two baritones and chamber ensemble combines the use of quarter tones with a Latin text.

From 1947 to 1970 she spent her summers as the music director of Camp Catawba for Boys, located near the Blue Ridge Parkway on the Boone side of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. In 1985, she inherited the camp grounds from Vera Lachmann (1904-1985), who had founded the camp in 1944, and lived there year round from then until her death.

Her works have been performed by such performers as the Kohon Quartet, the pianists Grete Sultan and Loretta Goldberg, and recorder player Pete Rose.

She is named for the tui, a bird native to New Zealand, where her mother was born.

[edit] Discography

Indian Summer: Three Microtonal Antiphons on Psalm Texts. LP. Greenville, Maine: Opus One, [1984?].
String Quartet Number One. LP. Greenville, Maine: Opus One, [1986?].
Herzliebster Jesu. CD. Harriman, New York: Spectrum, 1988. (Title of disc: Buxtehude, Moondog & Co., performed by Paul Jordan, Schuke organ.)
Second Piano Sonata, "The Peyote." CD. Greenville, Maine: Opus One, [1991?]. (Title of disc: Soundbridge, performed by pianist Loretta Goldberg.)
The Music of Tui St. George Tucker (1998). Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Centaur.