Music Encyclopedia

Spratlan, Lewis

 

índice de Music Encyclopedia

Página 1 de 3

Spratlan, Lewis.
(b Miami, FL, 5 Sept 1940). American composer. He studied at Yale University (BA 1962, MM 1965) under Powell and Schuller, and attended seminars with Rochberg and Sessions at the Berkshire Music Center (1966). His numerous honours include an NEA grant (1976), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980-81) and top prizes in the Alvin Etler Memorial and Rockefeller Foundation-New England Conservatory Opera competitions (1974 and 1979, respectively). In addition he has been awarded several residencies at the MacDowell Colony. After teaching at Pennsylvania State University, Spratlan joined the music faculty of Amherst College, Massachusetts, in 1970. While primarily a composer, he has also been active as a conductor and as an oboist.

Spratlan’s compositions span all genres and reflect an enormous variety of cross-cultural influences. His style draws not only upon the traditional western European musical heritage ranging from chant to modernists such as Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Ligeti, but also upon the musics of other cultures, particularly those of southern India and Latin America. The influence of composers like Musorgsky and Skryabin, jazz musicians including Monk, Mingus, Davis and Coltrane, and minimalists such as Reich can be heard as well. His style has been praised for its dramatic effect and vivid colour. While his works up to the mid-1970s reflect a deep sympathy with the music of the Second Viennese School, the opera Life is a Dream (1975-7) marks a shift towards a new degree of harmonic clarity and stasis, melodic repetition and a concern for changes in harmonic rhythm as a principal means of formal articulation. The chamber work Coils (1980) received widespread attention for its inclusion of the ‘terpsiptomaton’ (literally, ‘delight in falling mechanism’), a hybrid string/piano/percussion instrument invented and assembled by the composer from wrought iron coils and rods, piano strings and cartridges containing ball bearings. His music from the 1980s and 90s has become increasingly inclusive in style, often making references to jazz and other pop musics as well as various non-Western traditions, with each serving as a kind of expressive entity within the larger mosaic-like musical fabric. The Apollo and Daphne Variations (1987), In Memoriam (1993) and the Concertino for violin and chamber ensemble (1995) are major representative works.