Background

Michael Colgrass was born on April 22, 1932, in Brookfield, Illinois. He was the son of Michael, a postmaster, and Ann Colgrass.

Education

Michael Colgrass attended Riverside-Brookfield High School. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1954 with a degree in performance and composition, and his studies included training with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Festival and Lukas Foss at Tanglewood.

Career

While a student at Riverside-Brookfield High School, Michael Colgrass started playing in jazz bands, like Three Jacks and a Jill. He played the drums. Later in his high school years, he developed an interest in bebop and more experimental music. His music career began with performings as a jazz percussionist in and around Chicago in 1944-1949.

At the University of Illinois, Michael began composing his music, starting with The Three Brothers in 1950. After graduating from Illinois in 1954, he served two years as a timpanist in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Germany and then eleven years as a freelance percussionist in New York. His wide-ranging performance venues included the New York Philharmonic, American Ballet Theater, Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway, the Columbia Recording Orchestra's Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera, and jazz ensembles. Michael organized the percussion sections for Gunther Schuller's recordings and concerts, as well as for premieres of new works by John Cage, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varese, and many others. During this New York period, he continued to study composition with Wallingford Riegger and Ben Weber.

As a percussion soloist, Michael Colgrass premiered many of his works: with Emanuel Vardi in Variations for Four Drums and Viola (also recorded for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Records), in Fantasy Variations for percussion soloist and percussion sextet at Carnegie Recital Hall, in Rhapsodic Fantasy for Fifteen Drums and Orchestra with the Danish Radio Orchestra, in recordings of his own Three Brothers (Urania Records) and Percussion Music (Period Records). As a composer, among Michael Colgrass's works were Crossworlds for flute piano and orchestra, Pan Trio, Side by Side for harpsichord, and altered piano, Zululand for wind ensemble, and others. Michael received commissions from the New York Philharmonic and The Boston Symphony. Also from the orchestras of Minnesota, Detroit, San Francisco, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh, Washington, Toronto, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, The Canadian Broadcast Corporation, The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Manhattan and Muir String Quartets, The Brighton Festival in England, The Fromm and Ford Foundations, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and numerous other orchestras, chamber groups, choral groups, and soloists.

In addition to his music career, Michael Colgrass was a writer. He wrote My Lessons With Kumi, a narrative/exercise book, outlining his techniques for performance and creativity. This book was the result of his studies in neurolinguistic programming combined with his personal experience as a musician-performer from 1943 to 1967, including an eleven-year career as a freelance percussionist in New York. Participants in his Excellence in Performance seminars requested that he wrote his ideas in book form. Michael lectured on personal development and gave workshops throughout the world on the psychology and technique of performance, in which participants do exercises from this book.

Besides, Michael Colgrass had created a method of teaching children and teachers how to write music using graphics. In April 2009, he did a project with the Middleton Regional High School in Nova Scotia, where high school students should write seven pieces for the band in three days and conduct them in a public concert on the fourth. As a result, his method was adopted by the Nova Scotia education system for inclusion in the junior high curriculum. Besides, Michael was the founder of Deep Listening, a technique for using hypnosis with audiences to enhance listening pleasure.

Achievements

• Michael Colgrass was widely known as a musician. He performed at the wide-ranging performance venues such as the New York Philharmonic, American Ballet Theater, Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway, the Columbia Recording Orchestra's Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera, and jazz ensembles.
  
  Michael Colgrass won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for music for Déjà vu. Besides, he received an Emmy Award in 1982 from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for documentary program Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass. Michael also had awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, A Rockefeller Grant, First Prize in the Barlow and Sudler International Wind Ensemble Competitions, and the 1988 Jules Leger Prize for new chamber music.
  
  Besides, Michael Colgrass had created a method of teaching children and teachers how to write music using graphics. As a result, that method was adopted by the Nova Scotia education system for inclusion in the junior high curriculum. Also, Michael was the founder of Deep Listening, a technique for using hypnosis with audiences to enhance listening pleasure.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Six Unaccompanied Solos for Snare Drum

    (Written to serve the high school student in a contest or ...)

    1957
  • Michael Colgrass

    (In this delightful collection of anecdotes, Michael Colgr...)

    2009
  • My Lessons With Kumi

    (Psychological principles and skills applied to performanc...)

    2000
  • Mystic With A Credit Card

    (Softcover sheet music booklet with trombone pulls out.)

    1980
  • Te Tuma Te Papa 1994
  • Wild Riot of the Shaman's Dreams 1992
  • Wolf 1976
  • Hammer And Bow 1997
  • Light Spirit 1963
  • Memento 1982
  • Letter from Mozart for Orchestra 1976
  • Concertmasters 1974
  • Déjà Vu 1977
  • Winds of Nagual 1985
  • Apache Lullaby 2003
  • Gotta Make Noise 2003
  • Old Churches 2000
  • Concertino for Timpani 1953

• music

  • Variations for Four Drums and Viola 1957
  • As Quiet As 1966
  • The Schubert Birds 1989
  • Chaconne 1984
  • Side by Side 2007
  • Arctic Dreams 1991
  • Dream Dancer 2001
  • Raag Mala 2005
  • Urban Requiem For Saxophone Quartet & Wind Ensemble 1995
  • The Beethoven Machine 2003
  • Chamber Piece for Percussion Quintet 1954
  • Fantasy Variations 1961
  • Inventions on a Motive 1955
  • Percussion Music 1953
  • Three Brothers 1951

Views

Michael Colgrass believed that the more people work, the more inspired they get. He thought that "craft is like a lightning rod that attracts inspiration. The more people know about instruments and music, the more inevitable it will be that they will get ideas for writing pieces." Also, he considered that "people are vitally interested in the creative process, and when they have to compose their pieces, they have a hell of a lot of fun doing it."

Quotations: "A friend described my motivation for writing when he called me an "escapee." When I asked him what he meant, he said, "You escaped from Brookfield, Illinois - population 10,000 - and escapees often feel compelled to go back and help others escape."

"I am a composer. I make my living as a composer of classical music, so-called. I like writing for symphony orchestras and that sort of thing, as opposed to rock or jazz music. I was a jazz musician originally, but I just love the idea of writing for the symphony orchestra, and the so-called symphonic musician."

Membership

• 

  American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers , United States

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Michael Colgrass was a serious composer, but he also knew how to make audiences "laugh out loud." - Ulla Colgrass

Interests

• Music & Bands

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Maurice Ravel, Anton Webern, Charles Edward Ives

Connections

Michael Colgrass married Ulla Dahgaard on November 24, 1966. They had a son, Neal Colgrass.

Father:

Michael Colgrass

Michael Colgrass was an Italian immigrant who had changed the family name from Colagrossi when he was working as a professional boxer. Later, he worked as a postmaster.

Mother:

Ann Colgrass

Ann Colgrass's maiden name was Hand. She was a homemaker.

colleague:

Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud was a French composer, conductor, and teacher.

colleague:

John Milton Cage Jr.

John Cage was an American avant-garde composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music.

Wife:

Ulla Colgrass

Ulla Colgrass's maiden name was Dahgaard. She was a journalist and editor who wrote about music and the arts.

Son:

Neal Colgrass

Neal Colgrass is a Canadian writer and filmmaker. He writes for Newser.com.

colleague:

Lukas Foss

Lukas Foss was a German-born American composer, pianist, and conductor, widely recognized for his experiments with improvisation and aleatory music.

colleague:

Gunther Alexander Schuller

Gunther Schuller was an American composer, performer, conductor, teacher, and writer noted for his wide range of activity in both jazz and classical music and his works embracing both jazz and advanced 12-tone elements.

colleague:

Elliott Cook Carter Jr.

Elliott Carter was an American composer, a musical innovator whose erudite style and novel principles of polyrhythm, called metric modulation, won worldwide attention. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1960 and 1973.

colleague:

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse

Edgard Varèse was a French-born American composer and innovator in 20th-century techniques of sound production.

colleague:

Wallingford Constantine Riegger

Wallingford Riegger was an American composer of orchestral works, modern dance, film scores, teaching pieces, and choral arrangements.

colleague:

William Jennings Bryan Weber

William Weber was an American composer. He was one of the first Americans to embrace the 12-tone techniques of Schoenberg, starting in 1938.

colleague:

Emanuel Vardi

Emanuel Vardi was an Israeli-American violinist, who considered to have been one of the great viola players of the 20th century.

References

• Michael Colgrass - Official website