Ursula Mamlok

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Ursula Mamlok (born February 1, 1923 in Berlin ; † May 4, 2016 there ), b. Meyer and Mayer, was a German - American composer and teacher .

biography

After the father Hans Meyer died prematurely and Ursula was only two years old, the mother remarried in 1929, and Ursula was given the surname of her stepfather Lewy. Starting with elementary school in Pestalozzistraße, Ursula Lewy then attended the Fürstin-Bismarck-Lyzeum in Berlin (today Sophie-Charlotte-Oberschule).

As for all Jews , a period of disadvantage and oppression began for Ursula and her family in the mid-1930s. In 1938, for example, Jewish children in the Fürstin-Bismarck-Lyceum had to leave school. For a short time Ursula was able to find accommodation in a vocational school, where she was supposed to learn how to make beds and iron correctly, before she was forbidden to visit there as well. Persecuted by the National Socialists , the Lewy family - with the exception of their grandparents, who had no affidavit and were later murdered in Auschwitz - ultimately left the country and went into Ecuadorian exile in Guayaquil in 1939 .

She began her musical training at an early age and was already receiving professional composition lessons at the age of 12 from Gustav Ernest , a lecturer at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität Berlin ). In exile, however, there were hardly any opportunities to pursue her musical career. There was a conservatory in her city in Guayaquil, where she also took lessons from Angelo Negri (1878–1947), but Ursula was unsatisfied. She therefore accepted the tedious post route to Berlin in order to get in touch with her former teacher Gustav Ernest. Unfortunately, this was not possible for long because Ernest later emigrated to the Netherlands and was ultimately murdered by the National Socialists.

Not deviating from her goal, she repeatedly sent manuscripts of her compositions to various conservatories in the USA . Just one year after her arrival in Guayaquil, she received a scholarship at the Mannes School of Music in New York. Only 17 years old, she came alone from Ecuador to New York by ship .

Since the composition lessons there with George Szell were too conservative for Ursula Lewy, she successfully applied in the summer of 1944 for a three-month scholarship at the famous Black Mountain College , where John Cage also taught in the following years . It was there that Ursula Lewy first encountered the works of Schönberg and the Vienna School . There she took piano lessons from Eduard Steuermann and attended a master class with Ernst Krenek . But it was a short visit by Roger Sessions that left a lasting mark on her and prompted her to take composition lessons from him. She later supplemented this with lessons from Jerzy Fitelberg .

In 1947 Ursula Lewy married Dwight Mamlok and moved to San Francisco . Since she did not yet have a university degree, nor did she feel like a “finished composer”, they returned to New York, where Ursula Mamlok finally received her bachelor's degree and her master's degree in 1957 with the help of a third scholarship from Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music of Music.

In the following years Mamlok taught composition for 40 years at the Manhattan School of Music, as well as at New York University and Temple University . The composer and conductor Tania León is one of her best-known students . In 2006 - after almost 70 years in the USA - she returned to Berlin after the death of her husband Dwight Mamlok. “It's a return to the city of birth” and “not to 'home' […].” Because: “My home is music”, as she herself said (TV Berlin). Ursula Mamlok died on May 4, 2016 in her native Berlin and was buried in the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery.

Music genre

Stylistically, Mamlok's works were close to Paul Hindemith's until the late 1950s . The Woodwind Quintet is one of the few works by them that is performed again and again today.

In the following years Ursula Mamlok began to look for new musical ways. In 1960 she took lessons from Stefan Wolpe, who was also persecuted by the National Socialists and who emigrated to New York . But that came to an end when she met his student Ralph Shapey . “With him the composer was there.” With his empathy, Ursula Mamlok was finally able to develop creatively and incorporate new composition techniques. It was Shapey who gave her first important performances, among others with the ensembles "Group Of Contemporary Music", " Continuum ", "Speculum", "Music In Our Time" and "Da Capo".

Paul Hertelendy also asked the question of style: “Does it belong to the old school? To the new school? To postmodernism? I think she's just Mamlok: independent, creative, dissonant and from within. "

Daniel Lienhard summarized her late style in the Schweizer Musikzeitung in 2010 as follows: “Due to the influence of Wolpe's theory of non-linear, multi-dimensional musical space, Shape's dissonant counterpoint and Schönberg's twelve-tone technique , Mamlok's works now have a modernist tendency that continues to this day. "

Works

Mamlok's oeuvre includes around 75 compositions, including orchestral works, numerous chamber music works, choral works, works for solo instruments, an electronic work and teaching materials. They are often particularly characterized by difficult rhythms set against one another, as in the extremely complex String Quartet No. 1 (1962), and of contrasts such as can be found in the dramatic structure in Mamlok's most famous work “Der Andreasgarten”, a song cycle based on poems by Dwight Gerard Mamlok (1987).

Awards

  • National Endowment for the Arts (1968 & 1981)
  • Koussewitzky Foundation Prize (1989)
  • Fromm Foundation Grant (1994)
  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1995)
  • American Academy Award
  • Institute of Arts and Letters Prize
  • Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation Prize
  • Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany (2013)

literature

  • Evelin Förster: Ursula Mamlok: A musical way of life , in: Forum Musikbibliothek, vol. 28, 2007, p. 132ff.
  • Habakuk Traber: Time in Flux: the composer Ursula Mamlok , Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-412-20440-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Edwin Baumgartner: Obituary: composer Ursula Mamlok died . ( Memento from May 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) In: wienerzeitung.at , May 5, 2016, accessed on October 11, 2019.
  2. ↑ Georg Beck: See the ditch, cultivate the garden. Ursula Mamlok: History of a Return and Protocol of a Record Recording . In: Neue Musikzeitung . No. 4 . ConBrio , 2011, ISSN  0944-8136 ( nmz.de [accessed on October 11, 2019]).
  3. ^ Obituary notice in the FAZ , May 28, 2016.
  4. ^ Paul Hertelendy, Mercury News San Francisco, 1994.
  5. ^ Daniel Lienhard: Ferne Klänge - on the trail of lost music of the 20th century . In: Swiss music newspaper . No. December 12 , 2010, ISSN  1422-4674 ( musicdiversity.ch [PDF; accessed October 11, 2019]).
  6. ↑ Biography of Dwight Gerard Mamlok on: mamlokstiftung.com
  7. ↑ Peter Sühring : Habakuk Traber: Time in Flux. The composer Ursula Mamlok . Review on info-netz-musik, January 9, 2013, January 16, 2013; accessed on September 21, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Mamlok, Ursula
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 4th May 2016
Place of death Berlin