Arnold Rosner
1945 - 2013
United States of America, NY
Arnold Rosner (08/11/1945 - 08/11/2013), an American composer of classical music, born in New York City, died in Brooklyn. Rosner got his training at State University of New York at Buffalo, New York; according to his own account he learned nothing there. Rosner developed an individual style that fused elements of Renaissance music with the heightened drama and rich sonorities of late romanticism. He composed three operas, eight symphonies, six string quartets, chamber music and songs. Many of his compositions were influenced by his Jewish background, but also by Catholicism.
Source: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Rosner |
During his fifty-year compositional career, the American composer Arnold
Rosner (1945–2013) produced a body of work that combined diverse influences
into a powerful and distinctly personal musical voice. His catalogue comprises
compositions in nearly every genre, including three operas, eight symphonies,
numerous works for orchestra and wind band, several large-scale choral works and
many chamber, solo and vocal pieces.
Rosner’s musical language was founded upon the harmonic and rhythmic
devices of the polyphonic music of the Renaissance and early Baroque. These roots
can be found, to a larger or smaller degree, in virtually all his music. To them he
added a free triadicism and exotic modalities, intensified in some works by more
contemporary harmonic dissonance, enriching this language with the lavish
orchestration and emotional drama of turn-of the-century late Romanticism – and
yet, despite its fusion of seemingly incongruous elements, most of his music is readily
accessible, even to untutored listeners. What makes Rosner’s music worthy of serious
consideration, rather than being merely an integration of earlier styles, is the way
he shaped his unusual language to encompass an enormous expressive range – far
broader than one might imagine possible – from serene beauty to violent rage.
The Requiem, one of his largest and most ambitious works, embraces this gamut of
emotional expression.
Born in New York City in 1945, Rosner took piano lessons as a boy and soon
developed a voracious interest in classical music. Some sounds in particular appealed
to him – juxtapositions of major and minor triads, as well as modal melodies – and
before long he was working these sounds into music of his own. His family, fully
aware of the remote prospects of success offered by a career in the composition
of classical music, encouraged him to pursue more practical endeavours, and so he
attended the Bronx High School of Science, whence he graduated at the age of fifteen,
and then New York University, with a major in mathematics. But all the while he was
composing: sonatas, symphonies, concertos and more – not that anyone was especially
interested in hearing the fruits of his labours. His composer-heroes at the time were
Hovhaness, Vaughan Williams and Nielsen, and their influence is evident in much of
his early work.
Graduating from NYU before he turned twenty, Rosner then spent a year at the
Belfer Graduate School of Science, continuing his studies in mathematics. But, no
longer able to resist the inner drive to pursue musical composition as his primary
activity, he entered the University of Buffalo the following September, with a major in
music composition. He took this step in 1966, when serialism was the dominant style
in university music departments, and young composers were often coerced, directly or
indirectly, into adopting it. Rosner often recounted how the Buffalo faculty dismissed
his creative efforts with varying degrees of contempt. Later, in describing his educational
experience there, he would say that he ‘learned almost nothing’ from these pedants.
Although most of his peers capitulated to the pressure to embrace the style du jour,
Rosner was adamantly opposed to serialism and stubbornly refused to accept a view
of music that violated his most fervently held artistic values – and so, in response,
his department repeatedly rejected the large orchestral work he had submitted as his
dissertation. Realising that they would never accept the kind of music he considered
meaningful, he gave up the notion of a doctorate in composition, and decided instead
to pursue a degree in music theory, with a dissertation – the first ever – on the music of
Alan Hovhaness. He completed this task successfully, and in the process became the first
recipient of a doctorate in music granted by the State University of New York.
He devoted the rest of his life to writing the music that represented his personal
aesthetic ideals, supporting himself through academic positions at colleges in and
around the New York City area. His most enduring position was as Professor of Music
at Kingsborough Community College (of the City University of New York), which he
held for thirty years, until his death. During the course of his compositional career, his musical language gradually expanded from its idiosyncratic and intuitive beginnings.
Author: | Walter Simmons |
Source: | Booklet of CD TOCC0545 |
Requiem
Period: | Modernism |
Composed in: | 1973 |
Musical form: | free |
Text/libretto: | spiritual and secular texts on death from a number of the world’s cultures, including Whitman, Villon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sutra from Zen Buddhism and the Jewish Kaddish. |
Duration: | 69'22 |
Label(s): | Toccata Classics TOCC0545 |
Requiem, Op. 59 (1973) contains:
01. Overture: The Seventh Seal
02. Recitative: Ein Wort, ein Satz
03. Toccata: Musica Satanica
04. Ballade: Les Neiges d’antan
05. Sutra: Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo
06. Madrigal: To All, to Each
07. Organum: Lasciate ogni speranze
08. Prayer: Kaddish
09. Passacaglia: Libera Me
10. und wieder Dunkel, ungeheuer
Source: | https://toccataclassics.com/product/arnold-rosner-requiem-op-59/ |
Contributor: | Arye Kendi |
♫ 01. Overture: The Seventh Seal
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 02. Recitative: Ein Wort, ein Satz
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 03. Toccata: Musica Satanica
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 04. Ballade: Les Neiges d’antan
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 05. Sutra: Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 06. Madrigal: To All, to Each
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 07. Organum: Lasciate ogni speranze
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 08. Prayer: Kaddish
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 09. Passacaglia: Libera Me
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
♫ 10. und wieder Dunkel, ungeheuer
© Toccata Classics TOCC 0545
The Requiem, completed when the composer was 28, illustrates just how broadly his
language had expanded, even by this early age. Arnold Rosner died in Brooklyn, in
2013, on his 68th birthday.
Rosner’s Requiem came about through a set of unusual circumstances. The composer
had long been an admirer of the films of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, and he
had often cited The Seventh Seal (1957) as his favourite. The film takes place during
the fourteenth century and involves a knight who, having returned from the Crusades,
is confounded by the moral contradictions of religion. He decides to challenge Death
to a game of chess, in the hope of defeating this adversary of life. The story draws
upon many features of especial interest to Rosner: from his own religious and spiritual
uncertainties and ambivalence to his love of games like chess, and even his fascination
with numerological symbolism.
Sometime in 1971 Rosner became consumed by the idea of adapting Bergman’s
film into an opera. He wrote to the director to request permission for this adaptation
but received no response to his inquiries. Eager to proceed with this project, he began
composing anyway. Later that year he decided to travel to Europe for the first time,
mostly to meet some of the European composers whose music he admired; but he also
intended to try to pressure Bergman for a response to his idea. He finally managed to
reach him by phone and posed his request once again. Bergman responded that he had
never allowed any of his films to be adapted into any other medium, and was not about
to make an exception.
This response was extremely disappointing to Rosner, who had by then written a
substantial bit of music for the opera he had in mind. But after several months he arrived
at another idea: a full-length Requiem. What he had in mind was one that was nonsectarian, drawing upon biblical texts, secular poetry by French, German and American writers, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Jewish liturgy, among other sources.
He also imagined how he could repurpose the music he had written for the aborted
adaptation of The Seventh Seal. He completed the Requiem in 1973.
Author: | Walter Simmons |
Source: | Booklet of CD TOCC0545 |
Far from being a treatment of the usual Latin, the Requiem of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) sets spiritual and secular texts on death from a number of the world’s cultures, including Whitman, Villon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sutra from Zen Buddhism and the Jewish Kaddish. The work of a young man (Rosner was 28 when he wrote it), this Requiem is both monumental and wildly energetic – but it also encompasses passages of transcendent beauty. His musical language clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colours, producing a style that is instantly recognisable and immediately appealing. Some of the music was first written for an aborted operatic treatment of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, where the main character plays chess with Death; in like spirit, Rosner’s Requiem is a major statement of human defiance in the face of mortality, even if its gentle closing pages bring uneasy acceptance.
Source: | https://toccataclassics.com/product/arnold-rosner-requiem-op-59/ |