Misplaced Pages

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Otto Luening" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2021)

Otto Clarence Luening (June 15, 1900 – September 2, 1996) was a German-American composer and conductor, and flutist. He was an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music.

Biography

Luening was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to German parents, Eugene Luening, a conductor and composer, and Emma (nee Jacobs), an amateur singer. When he was 12, his family moved to Munich, where he studied music at the State Academy of Music. At age 17, he moved to Switzerland and attended the Municipal Conservatory of Music in Zürich and University of Zurich, where he studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Philipp Jarnach, and was also an actor and stage manager for James Joyce's English Players Company. He returned to the United States in 1924, and appeared mainly as a conductor of operas, in Chicago and the Eastman School of Music.

His conducting premieres included Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium, and his own Evangeline.

Luening's tape music, including A Poem in Cycles & Bells, Gargoyles for Violin & Synthesized Sound, and Sounds of New Music demonstrated the early potential of synthesizers and special editing techniques for electronic music. An October 28, 1952 concert with Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City introduced Fantasy in Space, flute recordings manipulated on magnetic tape, and led to an appearance on The Today Show with Dave Garroway. Luening was co-founder, along with Ussachevsky, of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1958. He also co-founded Composers Recordings, Inc. in 1954, with Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel.

He died in New York City in 1996. His notable students include Chou Wen-chung, Charles Wuorinen, Joan Tower, John Corigliano, Harvey Sollberger, Faye-Ellen Silverman, Dave Soldier, Sol Berkowitz, Elliott Schwartz, Bernard Garfield, Norma Wendelburg, and Karl Korte. See: List of music students by teacher: K to M#Otto Luening.

Personal life

He married Ethel Codd on April 19, 1927, and divorced in 1959. He married Catherine Brunson, a music teacher, September 5, 1959, and was with her until his death.

Works

Luening set songs to words by Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sharpe, Naidu, Hermann Hesse, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A selection of those recorded include "She walks in Beauty", "Farm Picture", "Little Vagabond", "Young Love", "Wake the serpent not", "Requiescat", "Venilia", "Locations and Times", "Noon Silence", "Visor'd", "Infant Joy", "Good-night", "I faint, I perish", "Transience", "At Christmas time/In Weihnachtszeiten", "Ach! wer bringt die schönen Tage", Songs of Emily Dickinson, "Love's Secret", "Harp the Monarch Minstrel swept", and a Joyce Cycle.

References

1. ^ The Oscholars: Otto Luening

Bibliography

• Contemporary Authors Online, Detroit: Gale, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7876-3995-2

External links

• Otto Luening discography at Discogs
• Otto Luening at IMDb
• Otto Luening papers, 1900-1996, held by the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Interviews

• Otto Luening interview, July 20, 1985

v t e Electronic and electroacoustic music
Techniques	Circuit bending Computer music Experimental music Hyperinstrument Loop Tape loop Microsound Musique concrète Noise music Octophonic sound
By country	Chile France Germany
Active organizations	Computer Music Center Electronic Music Foundation Groupe de Recherches Musicales Institute of Sonology ICEM ICMA IRCAM NIME SEAMUS STEIM Toonzaal Studio WORM studio
Inactive organizations	BBC Radiophonic Workshop Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium NHK San Francisco Tape Music Center Studio d'Essai Studio for Electronic Music (WDR, Cologne) Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano

• 1900 births
• 1996 deaths
• Musicians from Milwaukee
• 20th-century classical composers
• 20th-century American composers
• American people of German descent
• 20th-century American male musicians
• American male classical composers
• American classical composers
• American electronic musicians
• Classical musicians from Wisconsin
• Columbia University faculty