Douglas Moore

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Douglas Stuart Moore (August 10, 1893 - July 25, 1969) was an American composer, educator, and author. He wrote for music the theater, film, ballet and orchestra, but his greatest fame was for his two operas The Devil and Daniel Webster (1938) and The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956).

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[edit] Biography

Moore was born in Cutchogue, Long Island, New York, and his ancestors can be traced back to the first settlers arriving to Long Island. He went to the Hotchkiss School, where he met Archibald MacLeish. In 1917, he graduated from Yale University. He then served in the Navy as a lieutenant, after which he went to Paris where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, Vincent d'Indy and Charles Tournemire. In 1921, Moore went to Cleveland as Director of Music at the Cleveland Museum of Art, during which he studied with Ernest Bloch at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and performed in plays at the Cleveland Playhouse. He made his debut as a composer and conductor in 1923 conducting his Four Museum Pieces with the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1926, Moore joined the music faculty at Columbia University, where he remained until his retirement in 1962. He was an effective and appreciated teacher whose genial manner made him popular amongst students. His teaching often included studies of contemporary music and at one point invited Béla Bartók for a small seminar in one of his classes. In 1954 he was a co-founder, with Otto Luening and Oliver Daniel, of the CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) record label. Apart from classical compositions, Moore also composed several popular songs whilst at Yale together with MacLeish and later in collaboration with John Jacob Niles. These songs were later published in 1921 under the collective title "Songs my Mother never taught Me". He also wrote two books on music, Listening to Music (1932) and From Madrigal to modern Music (1942). He lived his entire life in the family home Salt Meadow in Cutchogue, where his studio faced a tidal inlet. Douglas Moore died in the Eastern Long Island Hospital in the neighboring village of Greenport, Long Island 1969.

[edit] Music

Stylistically speaking, Moore's music is somewhat difficult to pigeonhole. Under the course of his artistic career he developed a highly personal musical language, basically romantic and richly tonal but with strong links to American folk music.

Influence during his musical education came mostly from his teachers namely d'Indy (he didn't get on too well with Boulanger), at the Schola Cantorum, whose harmonic treatment had quite a large influence on Moore, even his late compositions carry a certain whiff of d'Indy's techniques.

Moore is sometimes viewed as a conservative mainly because he tended to resist influence of the various musical vogues that arose, and ultimately fell, during his life. His chosen style was what some regard as "typicaly american" i.e. based on American folk music, though Moore never actually used any authentic folk tunes but rather created his own (much like Holst or de Falla). The creation of this style was greatly bolstered by Vachel Lindsay in the twenties, though Moore also allowed other styles influence him, such as jazz and ragtime. This is most readily apparent in his operas. The Ballad of Baby Doe for example has several rag elements (a honky-tonk piano is used extensively in the first scene) and in his 1958 "soap opera" Gallantry, the commercials for Lochinvar soap and Billy Boy wax are sung in a blueslike fashion. Furthermore, the allegretto from his second symphony has an almost neoclassical clarity to it.

He is sometimes compared to Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, but this doesn't really benefit Moore; he was rather different from both. One distinguishing characteristic of Douglas Moore's music is the modesty, grace and tender lyricism that mark the slower passages of his many works, especially his Symphony in A major and the clarinet quintet. The faster movements of the aforementioned compositions have a robust, jovial and a somewhat terpsichorean quality. Admittedly though, Moore was slower in development when it came to purely orchestral works and most of his energy was directed towards opera, he wrote eight of them mostly on American subjects, though one notable exception is Giants in the Earth which concerns Norwegian immigrants.

In the end however Douglas Moore must be regarded as one of the more important American composers of the twentieth century but, as The Grove says: "Time has not been kind to Moore's work" and it is very likely that, from a lifetime of extremely varied artistic excursions, he will be remembered for a single opera.

[edit] List of works

[edit] Stage works

  • Twelfth Night, incidental music (1927)
  • Greek Games, ballet (1930)
  • White Wings, chamber opera (1935)
  • The Headless Horseman, operetta (1936)
  • The Devil and Daniel Webster, folk opera (1939)
  • Giants in the Earth, opera (1949-50, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951)
  • The Ballad of Baby Doe, opera (1956)
  • Gallantry, a soap opera (1958)
  • The Wings of the Dove, opera (1961)
  • Carry Nation, opera (1966)

[edit] Orchestral works

  • Four Museum Pieces (1923)
  • The Pageant of P.T. Barnum, suite (1924)
  • Moby Dick, symphonic poem (1928)
  • A Symphony of Autumn (1928-30)
  • Overture on an American Tune (1932)
  • Village Music, suite (1941)
  • In memoriam (1943)
  • Down East suite, also arranged for violin and piano (1944)
  • Symphony No. 2 in A major (1945)
  • Farm Journal, suite (1947)
  • Cotillion Suite (1952)

[edit] Chamber works

[edit] Film music

  • Power in the Land (1940, material later used for Farm Journal in 1947)
  • Youth Gets a Break (1940)
  • Bip Goes to Town (1941)

[edit] External links

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