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The American composer and pianist, Richard Edward Wilson, was drawn at a young age to the concerts of George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. Much of his early musical study, including composition, took place at the Cleveland Music School Settlement (1954-1959). He studied there piano with Leonard Shure and cello with Ernst Silberstein. In 1963, he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Moevs and Randall Thompson. Upon graduation from Harvard, he received the Frank Huntington Beebe Award, which afforded him the opportunity to study piano in Munich with Friedrich Wührer (1963) and composition at the American Academy in Rome with Robert Moevs, his composition professor at Harvard. He later received a Master of Arts degree in Theory from Rutgers University (1966). He also studied piano With Shure in Aspen, Colorado and New York (1960).
In 1966, Richard Edward Wilson joined the faculty at Vassar College, where he was made Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music in 1976. He also served as chairman of it music department (1979-1982; 1985-1988; from 1995). He served there until 2016. In 1992, he became composer-in-residence of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York, where he gives pre-concert lectures.
Richard Edward Wilson is composer of orchestral, operatic, instrumental, and chamber music. He has composed over one hundred works, ranging in medium from solo tuba to full orchestra, which have been played in major halls around the world. His compositions are marked by a stringent yet lyrical atonality which often sets him apart from the established schools of modern American music: minimalism, twelve-tone, neo-romanticism, and avant-garde. Two of his works, Eclogue for solo piano, and his String Quartet No. 3, are considered high points of 20th-century American music. His large-scale orchestral works include the Symphony No. 1, premiered by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic and recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; Articulations, written for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He is also the composer of the one-act whimsical opera, Æthelred the Unready, based on the exploits of the ill-advised Saxon king, Æthelred II of England. He classified the three types of irregular resolutions of dominant seventh chords. Among those who have performed his music are Dawn Upshaw, Amy Burton, Jan Opalach, Mary Nessinger, Rolf Schulte, Sophie Shao, Blanca Uribe, Ursula Oppens, Fred Sherry, Walter Trampler, the Chicago Quartet, the Muir Quartet, the Delmé Quartet, the Composers Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt, the Residentie Orkest Den Haag under Gerald Ostkamp, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Pro-Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, the Sau Paulo Symphony, and the American Symphony all under Leon Botstein, and the Orquesta Sinfonica de Colombia under Luis Biava.
Richard Edward Wilson has received numerous awards, including: annual ASCAP awards from 1970; Walter Hinrichsen Award (1986) and Academy Award (2004) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Creative Arts Award in Music from the City of Cleveland; the Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (1994); the Guggenheim Fellowship (1992-1993) under which he composed his opera Æthelred the Unready; the Cleveland Arts Prize; residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation and the Bellagio Center in Italy; and commissions from the Koussevitsky and Fromm Foundations, Chamber Music America, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. |
