Gloria Coates

Gloria Coates (October 10, 1938 in Wausau, Wisconsin) is an American composer who has lived in Munich, Germany since 1969. She studied with Alexander Tcherepnin, Otto Luening, and Jack Beeson.

Music

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]

As one interview describes:

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.[2]

Mark Swed: “Coates is a master of microtones, of taking a listener to aural places you never knew could exist and finding the mystical spaces between tones.” [5]

As is described by Kyle Gann' liner notes to one of her albums:

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 Kyle Gann's article "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim",[3] 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, "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."

Painting

Besides composing, Gloria Coates also paints abstract expressionistic paintings that are often used as the covers for her albums. In her paintings, 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 Vincent van Gogh.

Compositions

The following is a list of Coates' musical compositions based on Theresa Kalin, edited by Christian Dieck

A. Instrumental music

a) Works for orchestra

b) Chamber orchestra with voice

c) Chamber music

1. Solo-instrument
2. Two instruments
3. Three and more instruments

B. Vocal Compositions

a) Works for choir

b) Works for Solo voice

1. Voice with piano
2. Solo voice with ensemble

C. Electronic Music

D. Multimedia

E. Theatre

F. Music in film productions

Articles by Gloria Coates (selection)

Discography (Selection)

Symphonies

Chamber Music

Literary Sources

  1. 1 2 American Composers Forum member bio: Gloria Coates at the Wayback Machine (archived July 16, 2011)
  2. ↑ Hunter, Trevor. "Gloria Coates: Beyond the Spheres", NewMusicBox.org. In conversation with Trevor Hunter July 11, 2008–3:00 p.m. at the home of Catherine Luening.
  3. ↑ Gann, Kyle. Sunday, April 25, 1999. "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim", The New York Times.
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