Jeffery Cotton
Jeffery Cotton (born April 4, 1957 in San Fernando , California , † February 4, 2013 in Philadelphia ) was an American composer .
Life
Cotton grew up in Los Angeles ; his half-brother is the folk singer Tom Rush . Cotton studied composition at California State University in Northridge with Daniel Kessner , Frank Campo and Aurelio de la Vega . In 1983 he completed his studies with a Bachelor of Music.
With a Fulbright scholarship , he then studied with Hans Werner Henze at the Cologne University of Music and Dance and accompanied him to Santa Fe in New Mexico in 1984 , where Henze worked as an assistant at the Santa Fe Opera . There composed Cotton and Henze the music for the film Love to the death of Alain Resnais and were awarded the "Prize of the German Record Critics." In the same year, Henze Cotton's concert aria Abendland premiered with mezzo-soprano Linda Hirst and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
In 1985 Cotton began an additional course in composition and theory as an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia , where he was a student of George Crumb , Jay Reise , Chinary Ung, and Richard Wernick . In 1989 he received his Master of Arts and Ph.D. Then he settled in New York City . There he had great success in 1988 with his CityMusic I: Berlin , a commissioned work that premiered in Carnegie Hall .
In 1990 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, returned temporarily returned to Germany and lived in Berlin , the German reunification . There he began to work on a ballet about the building of the wall, based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe .
From 1992 to 1996 Cotton was composer-in-residence in New York for the Orchestra of St. Luke's, a chamber orchestra founded in 1974 for which he composed numerous works. His CityMusic II: New York , composed for narrator and orchestra, which was specifically aimed at a young audience, was very successful . The work was premiered in October 1995 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Wolfgang Sawallisch and repeated in February 1996. The composer himself appeared as a narrator. The work was subsequently performed by several other orchestras.
He has received several prizes and awards for his work, including three BMI Student Composer Awards and the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters . Cotton was particularly critical of the German contemporary music scene, whose composers like to call themselves "avant-garde", but on the other hand appear very dogmatic and do not allow changes. In his essay The Death Struggle of Modern (German) Music , he writes about this situation:
“To this day, however, the German music world has not endeavored to advance to the next, whatever that may be. Instead, it has nested itself comfortably in an aesthetic that is uncompromisingly atonal, yes aharmonic and which lacks every line and every form. The irony is that this has been done for almost a hundred years, but the composers concerned still believe that their music is avant-garde (and, interestingly, that being part of the avant-garde is in itself an end in itself). "
Jeffery Cotton died of sudden cardiac arrest in 2013 .
Works (selection)
- 1985 - Four tableaus for flute and guitar
- 1986 - Seven Runic Songs for viola, guitar and harp
- 1992 - Quartet for Low Strings , for two violas, cello and double bass
- 1993 - Trio for clarinet, violoncello and harp
- 2002 - String Sextet
- 2003 - Night Music , for trumpet, piano and double bass
- 2003 - String Quartet No. 1
- 2004 - Meditation, Rhapsody and Bacchanal , for violin and percussion
- 2011 - String Quartet No. 2, serenade
literature
- Dan Coleman, Remembering Jeffery Cotton , April 5, 2013 ( online )
Individual evidence
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cotton, Jeffery |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American composer, writer, and computer programmer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 4th 1957 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | San Fernando , California |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th February 2013 |
| Place of death | Philadelphia |