Douglas Allanbrook (April 1, 1921 – January 29, 2003) was an American composer, concert pianist and harpsichordist. He was associated with a group of mid-twentieth century Boston composers who were students of Nadia Boulanger. His compositions are described by the Kennedy Center as "smooth, showing astute sense, assertiveness, and originality."[1][2]
Early life
Allanbrook was born on April 1, 1921, in Melrose, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He had one sister, Jean.[1][3][4] He began taking piano lessons at the age of eight. Within two years he was playing Bach, Haydn, and Czerny. By thirteen, he started composing; his first serious piece was entitled On the Death of a Beautiful White Cat. While in high school, he was composing sonatas for violin and piano and writing sketches for a Symphony in G minor.[5][2][3][4]
Education
After high school, Allanbrook studied at Boston University for one year. In 1939 he was hired as a music teacher at the Mary Wheeler finishing school,[5] a private girls' school, in Providence,[3][4] where Gloria Vanderbilt was among his piano students. In 1941, the Rhode Island Symphony played his student orchestral work "Music for a Tragedy."[5]
During the same year, Nadia Boulanger came to Providence[3] to accept an honorary degree from Brown University.[6] She heard some of Allanbrook's music and immediately took him under her wing.[5] He began commuting regularly to Cambridge to study with her,[3] and became part of her coterie of Boston composers, which included Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, Paul Desmarais, and Daniel Pinkham.[5] She eventually persuaded him to quit his teaching job to study full-time, for free, with her.[4]
In the fall of 1942, the Army drafted Allanbrook. Serving as an infantryman for three years, he fought his way up the Italian peninsula, in the process earning a Bronze Star[3][4] and starting his lifelong love affair with Italy.[5] His 1995 book, See Naples: A Memoir of Love, Peace, and War in Italy, recounts his wartime experiences with the 88th Division in the Italian Campaign, in which his division suffered a 75% casualty rate.[3]
He completed his B.A. degree in May 1948 and was awarded a Paine Traveling Fellowship from Harvard, which he used to spend the next two years (1948–1950) in Paris honing his composing and performing skills, once again studying under Nadia Boulanger.[1][3][7][4] There, he formed close musical friendships with composers Ned Rorem, Noël Lee, Leo Preger and Georges Auric.[5]
In 1952 he returned to the U.S. to become a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis in its Great Brooks Program.[3][8] Although he taught part-time at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore[3] from 1953 through 1956,[9] he chose to stay at St. John's for the duration of his teaching career. Allanbrook was on the faculty at St. John's for 45 years, teaching music, math, philosophy, Greek, and French.[1][3][4]
In 1982, he was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters music prize.[10] He retired from the college in May 1986, he continued to teach and perform there until his death. For many years, he was a member of the board at the Yaddo artists colony near Saratoga Springs, NY. He died in Annapolis, Maryland on January 29, 2003, from a heart attack at the age of 81.[1][3]
Catalog
His catalog contains 63 mature musical compositions, from his Te Deum (1942) to his String Quartet No. 6 (2002).[5] He greatly admired Boulanger and Stravinsky, and his formative years of composing show influence from both artists. His main works include seven symphonies, two operas, Ethan Frome and Nightmare Abbey (based on the novel by Thomas Love Peacock), sacred and secular choral works, four string quartets, numerous chamber pieces, and innumerable piano and harpsichord works.[1][2][3][4] His opera Ethan Frome[1] was written in 1951 was based on the novel by Edith Wharton.[3][5]
He performed the piano part himself in 1955 for Aaron Copland at the Harvard Club. However, the opera was shelved for fifty years until his son John Allanbrook directed in at the Eliot House.[1][11] During his lifetime, his orchestral works were performed by orchestras across America and Europe, including the National Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Stuttgart Philharmonic, Munich Radio Orchestra.[2][1] He had a warm and creative collaboration with the Annapolis Brass Quintet from 1975 until its disbandment in 1991. Other performers who gave premieres of his music under his supervision include harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, violinist Robert Gerle, and the Kronos Quartet.[5]
Personal life
Allanbrook was married twice, with both marriages ending in divorce. As recounted in See Naples, his first marriage was in 1952 to Candida Curcio,[3][7] a theater actress whom he met in Italy;[12] they had a son, Timothy,[3] an architect.[citation needed] Later in 1975, he married the Mozart scholar and future president of the American Musicological SocietyWye Allanbrook née Jamison (March 15, 1943 – July 15, 2010);[3][13] their son, John, is a musician[1][3] who has conducted recordings of several major Allanbrook works for Mapleshade Records.[11]
Publications
Douglas Allanbrook, See Naples: A Memoir. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.[7]
^ abcdeEder, Richard (October 1, 1995). "At peace with war". The Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, California, USA. p. 239. Retrieved November 12, 2023 – via newspapers.com.
^Hill, Michael (April 11, 1974). "He sets words of poetry to music". The Evening Sun. Baltimore, Maryland, USA. p. 38. Retrieved November 12, 2023 – via newspapers.com.