Мортен Лауридсен: Америка композиторының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American composer

Morten Johannes Lauridsen (born February 27, 1943) is an American composer and academic teacher. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer in residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1994 to 2001, and is the distinguished professor emeritus of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he taught for fifty two years until his retirement in 2019.

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Lauridsen worked as a Forest Service firefighter and lookout (on an isolated tower near Mount St. Helens), where he remained on this tower alone for ten weeks. Lauridsen stated that it was a great time of self reflection for him, and that it helped him realize that music needed to become a central part of his life. He attended Whitman College for 2 years, before traveling south to study composition at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn, and Harold Owen. He began teaching at USC in 1967 and has been on their faculty ever since. Lauridsen now divides his time between Los Angeles and his home in the San Juan Archipelago off the northern coast of Washington State.

His eight vocal cycles and two collections—Les Chansons des Roses (Rilke), Mid Winter Songs (Graves), A Winter Come (Moss), Madrigali: Six "FireSongs" on Italian Renaissance Poems, Nocturnes (Rilke, Neruda and Agee), Cuatro Canciones (Lorca), Four Madrigals on Renaissance Texts, A Backyard Universe, Five Songs on American Poems (Moss, Witt, Gioia and Agee) and Lux Aeterna—his series of sacred a cappella motets (O magnum mysterium, Ave Maria, O Nata Lux, Ubi caritas et amor, and Ave Dulcissima Maria) and numerous instrumental works are featured regularly in concert by distinguished artists and ensembles throughout the world. O Magnum Mysterium, Dirait on (from Les Chansons des Roses), O Nata Lux (from Lux Aeterna) and Sure On This Shining Night (from Nocturnes) have become the all time best selling choral octavos distributed by Theodore Presser, in business since 1783. His musical approaches are very diverse, ranging from direct to abstract in response to various characteristics (subject matter, language, style, structure, historical era, etc.) of the texts he sets. His Latin sacred settings, such as the Lux Aeterna and motets, often reference Gregorian chant plus Medieval and Renaissance procedures while blending them within a freshly contemporary sound while other works such as the Madrigali and Cuatro Canciones are highly chromatic or atonal. His music has an overall lyricism and is tightly constructed around melodic and harmonic motifs. Referring to Lauridsen's sacred music, the musicologist and conductor Nick Strimple said he is "the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, (whose) probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered." From 1993, Lauridsen's music rapidly increased in international popularity, and by century's end he had eclipsed Randall Thompson as the most frequently performed American choral composer."