Background
Kirchner, Leon was born on January 24, 1919 in Brooklyn. Son of Samuel and Pauline Kirchner.
Kirchner, Leon was born on January 24, 1919 in Brooklyn. Son of Samuel and Pauline Kirchner.
AB, University of California, Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1939, 40; studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions, Arnold Schoenberg.
3.
He began his music studies at the age of four. Five years later, his family moved to Los Los Angeles He began composing while a student at Los Angeles City College.
At the war"s end, he returned to Berkeley as a lecturer and assisted Sessions and Ernest Bloch in theory.
Kirchner held a Slee Professiorship at the University of Buffalo (succeeding Aaron Copland), and professorships at the University of California, University of Southern California, Yale University, the Juilliard School of Music, and Mills College, where he was the first Luther Brusie Marchant Professor from 1954 to 1961. In 1961 he succeeded Walter Piston at Harvard University, where he was named Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music in 1965 and taught until 1989.
3. Kirchner"s musical style is generally linear, chromatic, rhapsodic and rhythmically irregular.
lieutenant is influenced by Schoenberg but does not employ the twelve-tone technique. Many of his early works are sectional, with strongly contrasting textures and tempos.
In his later works, the textures and tempos tend to be more continuous and changes more gradual. By and large, Kirchner favored compact structures based on a minimal number of motifs.
According to Alexander Ringer, he remained consistently individual, unimpressed by changing fashion where "idea, the precious ore of art, is lost in the jungle of graphs, prepared tapes, feedbacks and cold stylistic minutiae".
He died of congestive heart failure at his home on Central Park West in New York City. He was 90.
( Publisher ID: 454-00154 )
Member American Society of Composers, American Academy of Arts and Letters (Gold Medal for Music, 2009), International Society Contemporary Music, League American Composers, National Institute Arts and Letters, American Academy Arts and Sciences, American Association of University Professors.
Married Gertrude Schoenberg, July 8, 1949. Children: Paul, Lisa.