Louis Adolphe Coerne

Louis Adolphe Coerne (born February 27, 1870 in Newark , New Jersey , † September 11, 1922 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American composer .

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After taking lessons in Stuttgart and Paris as a child , Coerne studied at Harvard University with John Knowles Paine and at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts (then: Stuttgart Conservatory). In 1890 he took violin lessons from Franz Kneisel and then studied composition with Joseph Rheinberger at the Royal Academy in Munich . He worked as Kapellmeister in Buffalo ( New York ), Northampton ( Massachusetts ), Boston and Madison ( Wisconsin ) and finally as a music teacher in New London ( Connecticut ). He also taught at Smith College , Harvard, and Connecticut College .

The extremely productive Coerne composed over five hundred works, including four operas , a symphonic poem , overtures , drama music, marches , a violin concerto, cantatas , a mass , chamber music works, songs , anthems and choirs.

He wrote a number of teaching works for piano. His orchestral work, the symphonic poem Excalibur, Op. 180 , was recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 1960s and reissued on CD in 2006. His cantata Hiawatha, Op. 18 was premiered in Munich in 1893 and performed again in 1894 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra . His opera Zenobia, Op. 66 , which premiered in Bremen, was the first opera by an American composer to be performed in Germany in 1905. Other operas composed by him are A Woman of Marblehead, Op. 40 , Sakuntala, Op. 67 and The Maiden Queen, Op. 69 .

In early 1905 Coerne received a PhD from Harvard. Zenobia's score and his book The Evolution of Modern Orchestration , published in 1908, were part of his dissertation .

literature

• Louis Adolphe Coerne: The Evolution of Modern Orchestration . The Macmillan Company, New York 1908, ISBN 978-1-290-79747-4 .
• John Tasker Howard: Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of It . Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York 1931, ISBN 978-1-125-92949-0 .
• Coerne and His New Opera , in: New York Times , December 17, 1905, PDF Online .