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Quartets


First name: Robert
Last name: Palmer
Dates: 1915-2010
Category: Quartet
Nationality: american
Opus name: Quartet no 1 for piano and strings (1947)
Publisher:
Peculiarities: See: http://www.earsense.org/chamberbase/works/?newquery=1&nolq=1&composerKey=2025
Information: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Robert Moffat Palmer (b. June 2, 1915, Syracuse, New York; d. July 3, 2010, Ithaca, New York) was an American composer, pianist and educator. He composed more than 90 works including two symphonies, Nabuchodonosor (an oratorio), a piano concerto, four string quartets, three piano sonatas and numerous works for chamber ensembles. Born in Syracuse, New York, Palmer began, at age 12, piano studies with his mother. He attended Syracuse's Central High School, undertaking pre-college studies in piano and additional study of violin and music theory at the Syracuse Music School Settlement. Awarded a piano scholarship to the Eastman School of Music, he soon became a composition major] At Eastman he studied with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers, earning bachelor's (1938) and master's (1940) degrees in composition. He undertook additional studies with Quincy Porter, Roy Harris and, at the first composition class at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1940, with Aaron Copland. Palmer came to national attention in an article titled "Robert Palmer and Charles Mills" published in 1943 by critic Paul Rosenfeld in Modern Music. Further national attention came with the publication in 1948 by Aaron Copland of an article in the New York Times titled "The New 'School' of American Composers." Early in his career, Palmer taught music theory, composition and piano at the University of Kansas from 1940 until 1943. From 1943 until his retirement in 1980 Palmer served as a member of the faculty at Cornell University, where he was appointed Given Foundation Professor of Music. Additionally, Palmer served as visiting composer at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1954 and as the George A. Miller Professor of Composition at the University of Illinois in 1955-56. Many of Palmer's most distinctive works date from his Cornell period. Most influential of these was the mighty Piano Quartet, which used to loom large as one of the major accomplishments of American chamber music." Echoing this assessment, Robert Evett, in a review written in 1970 for the Washington Evening Star of Palmer's first Piano Quartet (1947), found it "one of the most engrossing works of a superb American composer . . . . At its premiere, it was a triumph. It was a triumph again last night." Palmer's publishers include Elkan-Vogel, Peer International, C. F. Peters Corporation, G. Schirmer Inc., Valley Music Press, and Alphonse Leduc-Robert King, Inc. Arthur Cohn, surveying four works by Palmer in The Literature of Chamber Music (1997), detects "brilliant contrapuntalism" in Palmer's "vitally communicative music." Cohn notes that "in Palmer's hands repetition is always paralleled by change" and finds "positive tonalism, broadened and colored by contemporary expansion" in the music of "this American composer of virile voice."