Charles Peter Wuorinen (, ; June 9, 1938 – March 11, 2020) was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He also performed as a pianist and conductor. Wuorinen composed more than 270 works: orchestral music, chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal works, and operas, such as Brokeback Mountain (2014). His work was termed serialist but he came to disparage that idea as meaningless. Time's Encomium, his only purely electronic piece, received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Wuorinen taught at several institutions, including Columbia University, Rutgers University and the Manhattan School of Music.
Life and career
Background
Wuorinen was born in New York City on June 9, 1938. His father, John H. Wuorinen, the chair of the Columbia University history department, with Paul Zukofsky and the BSO conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. In 1976 Wuorinen completed his Percussion Symphony, a five-movement work for 24 players including two pianos for the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble and his longtime colleague Raymond Des Roches, as well as his opera subtitled "a baroque burlesque", The W. of Babylon with an original libretto by Renaud Charles Bruce. The New Jersey Percussion Ensemble had also performed and recorded Wuorinen's composition "Ringing Changes" in collaboration with the Group for Contemporary Music prior to the Percussion Symphony, setting the stage for this challenging larger-scale work. The ensemble, created by Raymond Des Roches, recorded the Percussion Symphony, which was released in 1978 by Nonesuch. In the late 1970s Wuorinen became interested in the work of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation he conducted sonic experiments at Bell Labs in New Jersey. In an interview with Richard Burbank, Wuorinen is quoted as saying:
<blockquote>What I did at Bell Labs (with Mark Liberman) was to try various experiments in which strings of pseudo-random material, usually pitches but sometimes other things, were generated and then subjected to traditional types of compositional organization, including twelve-tone procedures. What I wanted to do was to see whether or not these things sounded "composed," sounded purposively chosen. They did, at least by my lights. The random sequences were not just any old random sequences but were that of a kind called 1/f randomness.</blockquote>
1980s
The 1980s were framed by two large-scale works for chorus and orchestra based on Biblical texts, the 60-minute oratorio The Celestial Sphere for the 100th Anniversary of the Handel Oratorio Society in Rock Island Illinois of 1980 and Genesis (1989), jointly commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. Other major orchestral works during this period include the Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra; the Third Piano Concerto, written for pianist Garrick Ohlsson; Movers and Shakers, the first work commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for music director Christoph von Dohnányi; Bamboula Squared for computer-generated sound and orchestra (inspired by Wuorinen's work at Bell Labs); and The Golden Dance. Wuorinen was composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony from 1984 to 1989. Major chamber works of the 1980s include his Third String Quartet commissioned to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, The Blue Bamboula for pianist Ursula Oppens, the Sonata for Violin and Piano commissioned by the Library of Congress and premiered at the Library on an all-Wuorinen concert, String Sextet, New York Notes, Third Piano Sonata for Alan Feinberg, and trios for various combinations including three works for horn trio.
In the 1980s Wuorinen began an association with the New York City Ballet which resulted in a series of works designed for dance: Five (Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra) for choreographer Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and Wuorinen's longtime colleague and champion Fred Sherry, Delight of the Muses based on works of Mozart and commissioned in honor of the Mozart's bicentennial, and three works inspired by scenes from Dante's La Divina Commedia for Peter Martins (The Mission of Virgil, The Great Procession and The River of Light). In addition to the Dante texts Wuorinen was influenced by the watercolors of William Blake. For the New York City Ballet Wuorinen also made a two-piano arrangement of Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra (Schoenberg) choreographed by Richard Tanner, and Martins created a ballet based on Wuorinen's A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. In 1985 Wuorinen was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. for his first season at the Boston Symphony Orchestra; the tone poem Theologoumenon (a 60th birthday gift for Levine from his longtime manager Ronald Wilford), premiered by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; and the Eighth Symphony: Theologoumena, for the BSO. In honor of Wuorinen's 70th birthday Levine conducted two performances of Wuorinen's Ashberyana at the Guggenheim Museum.
Other champions of Wuorinen's music include Peter Serkin, for whom Wuorinen composed three concertos including Time Regained (based on music of Machaut, Matteo da Perugia, Guillaume Dufay, and Orlando Gibbons) and Flying to Kahani, commissioned by Carnegie Hall; the solo Scherzo and Adagio; and the Second Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet, another ensemble with which Wuorinen has had a very fruitful relationship and for which he wrote his Fourth String Quartet.
In 2004 the New York City Opera premiered his opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories based on the novel by Salman Rushdie, with a libretto by James Fenton. Other works from this decade include Cyclops 2000 for Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta; Ashberyana, settings of poetry by John Ashbery; Spin5, a chamber concerto for violinist Jennifer Koh; the Fourth Piano Sonata, for Anne-Marie McDermott; Synaxis; Metagong; and It Happens Like This, a dramatic cantata on seven poems by James Tate premiered at Tanglewood with the composer conducting.
Between 2008 and 2012, Wuorinen composed the opera Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx's short story of the same name and with a libretto adapted by Proulx. It premiered on January 28, 2014, at the Real in Madrid to mixed reviews.
Death
On September 7, 2019, Wuorinen suffered a fall that caused a subdural hematoma. Over the next several months he had three additional falls, ultimately leading to his death on March 11, 2020, at New York Columbia-Presbyterian hospital. A requiem mass was held at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church on May 30, 2020. It was broadcast live and uploaded to YouTube.
Music
Wuorinen wrote more than 270 pieces, including the operas Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Brokeback Mountain. In later years, he called the term serialism "almost without meaning".
Much of Wuorinen's music is technically complex, requiring extreme virtuosity by the performer, including wide leaps, extreme dynamic contrasts, and rapid exchange of pitches.
In 2019, Perspectives of New Music published a Festschrift, Charles Wuorinen: A Celebration at 80, comprising analytical articles and compositions written for the occasion by Wuorinen's friends and colleagues. The issue (Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2018) was followed by an 80th birthday celebration at the Eastman School of Music that featured a master class, a symposium, and concerts of his music as well as works dedicated to him.
Criticism
Wuorinen was criticized as intolerant and hostile in his writings toward people with differing views on music.
In a 1988 interview, Wuorinen said, "I feel what I do is right [...] pluralism has gone too far",