Judith Lang Zaimont (b.1945) has been on the Composition faculty at the University of Minnesota since 1992. She has served on the faculties of the Peabody Conservatory and Queens College and was Chair of Music at Adelphi University prior to her move to Minnesota. Raised in a musical family, she began her professional career as a member of a touring duo-piano team which appeared frequently in concert and on television. Although she continued to use her formidable talents as a pianist, gradually she turned her energies toward music composition, and in a few years, her accomplishments as a composer superseded her reputation as a performer. Zaimont, who holds degrees from Queens College and Columbia University, is a recipient of Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Maryland State Arts Council, Presser Foundation, and Alliance Française. She was the First Prize winner in the international McCollin Competition, which resulted in performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Zaimont is editor-in-chief of The Musical Woman book series, for which she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Recent commissions include works for the Connecticut Opera, Greenville (S.C.) Symphony, (Johns) Hopkins Symphony, and Baltimore Dance Theatre. Zaimont's music uses a chromatic, fully-evolved tonality, and is characterized by its lyricism, expressive strength, and rhythmic vitality.
Vally Weigl (1899-1982) was born in Vienna and into the musically rich world of Austria. She studied piano, music, and musicology at the University of Vienna and studied theory and composition with Karl Weigl (1881-1949), whom she later married. In 1938 the Weigls were rescued from the oncoming war in Europe by the Quaker Society of Friends and were brought to the United States, where Vally Weigl continued her career as composer and piano teacher. Weigl set many poems for chorus and for solo voice with instrumental chamber ensembles. A National Endowment for the Arts grant enabled her to compose and record Natures Moods, New England Suite, and four song cycles. In her mid fifties after a serious shoulder injury, Weigl entered Columbia University and earned a master's degree in music therapy. Hers was a life of diversity: she was chief music therapist at New York Medical College and she taught at Roosevelt Cerebral Palsy School and directed research projects at Mount Sinai Hospital's psychiatric division and the Hebrew Home for the Aged. In the 1960s, along with lithographer Fritz Eichenberg, Weigl organized "Arts for World Unity," a group devoted to using the arts to bring together people of the world. She became very active in presenting programs of music, dance, poetry, and art designed to promote the cause of peace and understanding.
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), one of the most learned, skilled, and multi-faceted musicians of the twentieth century, was a violist, author, and an influential teacher as well as an important composer. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1940. Hindemith was interested in the interaction between music and people. He composed children's "music plays" and beginning teaching methods for strings and winds, and helped organize the system of musical education in Turkey. Hindemith believed in composing for the enjoyment of amateurs as well as for professional musicians. As head of the music faculty of Yale University, Hindemith exerted a strong influence on music in the United States. His compositions include orchestra masterpieces, choral works, operas, concertos, instrumental solos and sonatas, songs, ballets, film music, and chamber music for diverse combinations of instruments.
Links to alphabetical list of composers:
Bios and links to all their recordings at this site
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