Gloria Coates

Gloria Coates (October 10, 1938 in Wausau, Wisconsin) is an American composer who has moved to, and has subsequently been living in Munich, Germany since 1969. 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)".[1] 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".[1]

"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 quartertones and glissandos evoke gloomy instability, but also unearthly beauty." [1]

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,[2] 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,'" she said from her home in Munich (see neo-Romanticism).

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.

Contents

Chronological List of works

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)

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

Sources

  1. ^ a b http://www.composersforum.org/member_profile.cfm?oid=6585
  2. ^ Gann, Kyle. Sunday, April 25, 1999. "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim", The New York Times.

External links