The American composer Christopher Rouse studied at Oberlin and with George Crumb, followed by further study at Cornell He teaches at the Eastman School of Music and at the Juilliard School. In a successful career as a composer he has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his Trombone Concerto in 1993. His early interest in percussion is reflected in a number of his compositions and his musical language has developed from early dissonance to a synthesis of contemporary techniques and the language of earlier composers whom he admires, Berlioz, Bruckner and Shostakovich among others.
Orchestral Music
Christopher Rouse's Symphony No.1 is in the form of a single-movement Adagio, and is described by the composer as a sort of homage to composer's he admires, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Hartmann, Petterson and Schuman, and with a quotation from Bruckner's Symphony No.7. Phantasmata, its title suggested by the writing of Paracelsus, has three movements, The Evestrum of Juan de la Cruz in the Sagrada Familia, 3 a.m. for strings and percussion, The Infernal Machine, a title taken from Cocteau, and Bump, described as a nightmare conga.
