Composer
Biography:
Born on June 9, 1938 into a highly educated, culturally active, Finnish-born New York family, Charles Wuorinen began composing at the age of five and won the 1954 New York Philharmonic's Young Composer Award at the age of sixteen. He enjoyed a varied education as a musician on the piano and organ, in conducting and choral singing. Edgard Varèse and Jacques Barzun were among his main patrons. To a certain extent, Wuorinen merged ideas from Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg, according to his own admission, took over from Varèse the will to constantly expand resources and to overcome all conventional obstacles, mainly formal ideas from Elliott Carter, from Stefan Wolpe some very specific peculiarities and appropriated by Milton Babbitt whose ideas on harmonics. In Babbitt he admires the "an enormously important musical thinker and a great composer" who had a profound influence on him when he was young - particularly on the twelve-tone theory.
In 1962 he founded the pioneering »Group for Contemporary Music« together with Harvey Sollberger and Nicolas Roussakis. He continued to work extensively as a composer, pianist, conductor and professor of composition at various universities, and his 1979 textbook Simple Composition is now used by students around the world. In 1970, Wuorinen was the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for his electronic composition Time's Encomium, although it should be mentioned that electronic music actually plays a supporting role in his work. In the 1970s he found additional inspiration in the groundbreaking findings of the French chaos researcher Benoît Mandelbrot, with whom he became friends. He is still fascinated by the inexhaustible wealth of self-similarity structures in nature and their creative analogy in artistic work. After Stravinsky had sought some advice from him during his dodecaphonic stylistic phase, Wuorinen received permission from Stravinsky's widow in 1975 to process the master's last sketches, which happened in 1975 in A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. As a stage composer he has worked with writers such as Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx. The particularly committed musical pioneers of his music include the pianists Peter Serkin, Garrick Ohlsson and Ursula Oppens, the violinist Paul Zukofsky, the cellist Fred Sherry, the Brentano String Quartet and the conductors Michael Tilson Thomas, James Levine, Herbert Blomstedt and Oliver Knussen .
Wuorinen is not actually a serial composer, because the main characteristic of so-called serialism is that the regulating criteria are also applied to parameters other than melody and harmony, i.e. to rhythm and non-structurable parameters such as dynamics, tempo and timbre. Rather, Wuorinen is a classical twelve-tone composer through and through, and in that a kind of “maximalist” – he has internalized the language with the tone rows so much that it has become second nature to him. Within this, he is aware of the relationship between discipline and freedom, and the irregularities are an expression of the spontaneous element of the creative process.
Albums:
Chamber Music for Violin, Piano and Harpsichord:
