|
|
|
|
Morten Lauridsen
NPR Radio has called Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” a five-movement, non-liturgical requiem, “a rich, complex, intensely moving piece that people will be listening to for a long time to come.” The first recording of the work “demonstrates that it IS possible for important contemporary music to speak directly to the human heart.”
Lauridsen was born February 27, 1943, in Colfax, Washington. He was raised in Portland, Oregon, where his mother worked as a bookkeeper and his father was with the United States Forest Service. His mother was a pianist who had played in her high school dance band, and Lauridsen developed a love for music at an early age, by listening to her play swing jazz and singing to him. At age eight he started playing the piano, and a couple of years later learned to play the trumpet.
Lauridsen thought of music as an avocation, and didn’t enroll in any music classes in his freshman year at Whitman College in Washington. But then summer vacation rolled around, and he worked as a forest service lookout near Mt. St. Helens. “I was up there for 10 weeks by myself and did a lot of introspection,” he recalls. “I decided I must get into music in some way. So I went back to Whitman and took every music class I could. Then I transferred as a junior to the University of Southern California.”
Well-known American composer Halsey Stevens was chair of composition at USC and admitted Lauridsen to the undergraduate program. After music, Lauridsen’s second love was poetry, so choral composition was a clear choice. “In those early days, it was a natural thing for me to blend poetry and the human voice, which is the most wonderful and personal of all musical instruments. I ended up writing a great deal of choral music, and haven’t stopped.”
Enjoying the life of academia, Lauridsen became a professor at USC and in 1990 was named chair of the Composition Department. “I’m working with students,” he explains. “I’m guiding their creative endeavors and I’m around a very brilliant faculty of composers and performers.”
In 1980, Lauridsen was commissioned to write a piece to celebrate the centennial of USC. “Mid-Winter Songs,” based on poems by Robert Graves, was originally scored for piano and a chamber chorus. Robert Duerr, conductor of the Pasadena Chamber Symphony, commissioned an orchestral version, which was performed in 1983. Members of the board of the Los Angeles Master Chorale saw that performance, and brought it to the attention of conductor Roger Wagner, who premiered the work at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Wagner’s successor, John Currie, performed the same work in 1990. Four years later, Lauridsen was asked to become composer in residence for the Chorale. The first piece he wrote for them was “O Magnum Mysterium.” There have been more than 60 recordings of this work. Along with “Dirait-on,” it is the best-selling work distributed by the Theodore Presser Co.
Lauridsen has written six major vocal cycles. In addition to “Mid-Winter Songs,” they are: “Les Chansons des Roses,” “Cuatro Canciones,” “A Winter Come,” “Madrigali: Six ‘Firesongs’ on Renaissance Italian Poems,” and “Lux Aeterna.” He has also composed many individual songs and choral works. His compositions are regularly performed by distinguished ensembles such as the Atlanta Symphony Chorus; Chanticleer; the Robert Shaw, Dale Warland, and Elmer Iseler Singers; Los Angeles Guitar Quartet; the San Francisco Symphony Chorus; I Cantori and Dessoff Choirs of New York; Chicago a cappella; the Paul Hill Chorale; and the Los Angeles and San Francisco Chamber Singers.
Lauridsen travels around the world to record and perform his works. He has lectured or been composer in residence at two dozen universities and with groups such as the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir and the Seattle Chorale Company. He has been signed to peermusic since 1987. “It’s been a wonderful fit between a composer and a publisher,” he says. “My first publications with peer were art songs and I was very taken with their dedication to that form.”
Lauridsen spends his summers on a remote, rustic island off the state of Washington, with no electricity or running water. People write to tell him they can hear the serenity of the Pacific Northwest in his music. “So I’m sure [staying on the island] has had a profound effect on my music,” he acknowledges.
|
|
|
|
