Gloria Coates


Gloria Coates is an American composer who has lived in Munich, Germany since 1969. She studied with Alexander Tcherepnin, Otto Luening, and Jack Beeson. Her father Roland E. Kannenberg served as a Progressive in the Wisconsin State Senate from 1935 to 1939, and she sang at his rallies as a child.

Music

Her music features canonic structures and prominent, sometimes exclusive, glissandos, being "characterized by extremely strict, even rigid technical procedures, which are often worked out with unusual musical materials ". Her music is postminimalist, marked by the tension "not only between material and technique, but even more so between what would have to be termed 'sober-technical' compositional principles and the genuine direct expressive power and emotionality of the music".
As one interview describes:
Mark Swed: “Coates is a master of microtones, of taking a listener to aural places you never knew could exist and finding the mystical spaces between tones.”
As is described by Kyle Gann' liner notes to one of her albums:
In Kyle Gann's article "A Symphonist Stakes Her Claim", Gloria Coates was crowned, "the greatest woman symphonist", for her passionate pursuit and persistence in a domain that is dominated by men. However, this ambitious pursuit to be a woman symphonist has not been a conscious effort to set herself apart from the other female composers, instead in an interview she commented that it came through a natural manifestation trying to convey something deep within her. "When I did, I thought, 'That's really gutsy of me to call it a symphony,'" she said from her home in Munich, "I always had an idea of symphonies being in the 19th century, somehow. I never set out to write a symphony as such. It has to do with the intensity of what I'm trying to say and the fact that it took 48 different instrumental lines to say it, and that the structures I was using had evolved over many years. I couldn't call it a little name."

Painting

Besides composing, Gloria Coates also paints abstract expressionistic paintings that are often used as the covers for her albums. In her paintings, complementary colours such as red and green, yellow and blue, interact and mix with one another in the small strokes. The painterly manner, with layers of swirls of colours, is reminiscent of the style of Vincent van Gogh.

Compositions

The following is a list of Coates' musical compositions based on Theresa Kalin, edited by Christian Dieck

A. Instrumental music

a) Works for orchestra

1. Solo-instrument

a) Works for choir

1. Voice with piano

Symphonies