Дуглас Стюарт Мур: Жизнь и творчество американского композитора

American composer
other persons with this name

Douglas Stuart Moore (August 10, 1893 – July 25, 1969) was an American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author. A composer who mainly wrote works with an American subject, his music is generally characterized by lyricism in a popular or conservative style which generally eschewed the more experimental progressive trends of musical modernism. Composer Virgil Thomson described Moore as a neoromantic composer who was influenced by American folk music. While several of his works enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, only his folk opera The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) has remained well known into the 21st century. His father built another nearby home for his family on the Moore family's farm, named Quawksnest, in which Moore and his family spent their summers. As an adult Moore lived on the family's Cutchogue property until his death in 1969. Moore's father made a living as a publisher of among other things the literary magazine Ladies' World; a business which he sold to S. S. McClure upon his retirement in 1913. At the age of 13 he matriculated to the Fessenden School, a boys boarding school in West Newton, Massachusetts which he attended for the 1906–1907 academic year. After this, he completed the last four years of his college preparatory education at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut from which he graduated in the spring of 1911. At Hotchkiss he made close friendships with several fellow students that would last through adulthood. These included friendships with Archibald MacLeish, who became a three time Pulitzer Prize winning poet, writer, and the ninth Librarian of Congress; Donald Oenslager, who became a Tony Award winning scenic designer; Henry Luce, who founded the magazines Time, Life, and Fortune; and Emily Bailey, whom Moore eventually married in 1920. At Yale he composed songs for school events which demonstrated a talent for writing music within a popular style. Of the other songs he wrote while at Yale, the most well known is the Yale fight song "Goodnight, Harvard" which he composed in 1913. He earned two degrees from Yale University, a B. A. in philosophy in 1915, and a B. M. in music composition in 1917. For his final graduate project he conducted his orchestral composition Fantaisie Polonaise. One of Moore's composition classmates at Yale was Roger Sessions. He also wrote music to several poems by his friend MacLeish during this time. From D'Indy, Moore gained a compositional style similar to César Franck who had been D'Indy's teacher. During his time at CMA, Moore continued his education through continued composition studies with Ernest Bloch in his masterclass at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1921–1922. Moore thrived under Bloch more so than his earlier composition teachers. In 1925 he composed incidental music for a production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night on a commission from Richard Boleslawski's American Laboratory Theatre (ALT). While Moore had a positive experience as an organ pupil of Boulanger, his compositional studies were not happy ones under her tutelage. His interests in sentimental American subjects, opera, musical theatre, folk music, and a penchant for more conservative melodic writing clashed with Boulanger's progressive aesthetic of musical modernism. He also worked on his first stage work while in Paris, the musical Oh, Oh, Tennessee, but the work has never been published or performed. He was rapidly promoted from adjunct faculty member to assistant professor at the wider Columbia University and head of the music department at Barnard College specifically on July 1, 1927. Under his leadership, Moore was instrumental in instituting several new policies in the music program at Columbia. These included giving students college credit for playing in the orchestra and taking music lessons for the first time, opening up the orchestra to women players for the first time, and instituting scholarships for instrumentalists in the orchestra that were difficult to obtain (such as oboists and bassoonists). In addition to his busy schedule administrating the music program and conducting orchestra rehearsals and concerts, Moore taught courses in music appreciation. This latter work led to the publication of his first book, Listening to Music (1932), which was written for a general audience without any music background. In 1954 he was a co founder, with Otto Luening and Oliver Daniel, of the CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) record label. His second book was,From Madrigal to Modern Music (1942).

During his time at Columbia, Moore remained active as a composer; writing works with American themes. The first major work he composed during this time was the symphonic poem Moby Dick (1928); which told the story of Melville's 1851 novel of the same name through music. The symphony incorporates programmatic elements while maintaining a traditional symphonic form; although the work omits the scherzo movement. In 1934 Moore was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which enabled him to spend time in Bermuda composing his first opera, White Wings, after the 1926 Broadway play by dramatist Philip Barry. The overture for the opera was premiered by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra in June 1935; but a staging of the opera did not happen until fourteen years later when it was mounted by The Hartt School on February 10, 1949. Conflicts with Barry and his widow prevented the opera from being published.

Moore was also influenced by jazz and ragtime, developed by African Americans. This is most readily apparent in his operas. The Ballad of Baby Doe has several rag elements (a honky tonk piano is used extensively in the first scene). In his "soap opera" Gallantry (1950), the commercials for Lochinvar soap and Billy Boy wax are sung in a blueslike fashion. The allegretto from his second symphony has been described as having an almost neoclassical style. Douglas Moore's music has been described as having a "modesty, grace and tender lyricism", especially marking the slower passages of many works, especially his Symphony in A major and the clarinet quintet. The faster movements of these works have "robust, jovial and a somewhat terpsichorean quality." Most of Moore's energy was devoted to music for opera rather than to orchestral works. The novel Giants in the Earth was written by a Norwegian American and first published in Norwegian in 1921–1922. Moore composed music after the 1927 English translation of this work about Scandinavian settlers on the Great Plains was adapted as an opera. He won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Music for this work.