Fred Lerdahl a étudié à la Lawrence University, Princeton, et Tanglewood. Il a enseigné à UC/Berkeley, Harvard, et Michigan, et depuis 1991, il est Fritz Reiner Professor of Musique à l’Université Columbia.
Des commandes lui ont été passées par la Fondation Fromm, la Fondation Koussevitzky, le festival Spoleto, le National Endowment for the Arts, la Société de Musique de Chambre du Lincoln Center, la Bibliothèque du Congrès, Chamber Music America, entre autres.
Parmi les organisations qui ont représenté ses œuvres figurent le Philharmonique de New York, l’Orchestre Symphonique de Pittsburgh, l’Orchestre Symphonique de San Francisco, l’Orchestre Symphonique de Seattle, l’Orchestre Symphonique de Cincinnati, l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Los Angeles, l’American Composers Orchestra, le Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus, le Boston Symphony Chamber Players, la Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, eighth blackbird, Speculum Musicae, Collage, Argento, Talea, le Peabody Trio, le Juilliard Quartet, le Pro Arte Quartet, le Daedalus Quartet, Ensemble XXI, Lontano, et la Biennale de Venise.
Il a été résident au Marlboro Music Festival, l’IRCAM, le Wellesley Composers Conference, l’American Academy de Rome, le Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, le Yellow Barn Music Festival, le Beijing Modern Music Festival, l’Etchings Festival, le Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, et le Centre d’études avancées des Sciences Comportementales. La musique de Fred Lerdahl a été enregistrée sur plusieurs labels, et Bridge Records a créé la série de portraits “The Music of Fred Lerdahl”. “The Music of Fred Lerdahl, Vol. 4”, sorti en mai 2013, inclut Spirals du compositeur pour orchestre de chambre, Three Diatonic Studies pour le piano, Imbrications pour sextet mixte, Wake pour piano et ensemble, et Fantasy Etudes pour sextet mixte, avec des représentations par l’Argento Ensemble, le Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players, eighth blackbird, l’Odense Symphony Orchestra, la soprane Bethany Beardslee et la pianiste Mirka Viitala.
Son ouvrage majeur, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, écrit conjointement avec le linguiste Ray Jackendoff, est un document fondateur pour le domaine croissant de la science cognitive de la musique. Son ouvrage suivant, Tonal Pitch Space, a été récompensé en 2003 par la Society for Music Theory et un ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Un troisième ouvrage (en cours), Composition and Cognition, basé sur les conférences de Bloch en 2011, réunira sa double activité de compositeur et de théoricien.
En 2010, Lerdahl a été honoré d’une adhésion à l’Académie Américain des Arts et Lettres. Trois de ses œuvres composées depuis 2000, Time after Time, pour ensemble de chambre, le Third String Quartet, et Arches pour violoncelle et orchestre de chambre, ont été finalistes du Prix Pulitzer dans la catégorie musique.
Parmi les premières récentes figurent Time and Again avec l’Orchestre de Chambre Saint Paul, dirigé par Roberto Abbado, Fire and Ice pour soprano et contrebasse, au Tanglewood Music Center, et Give and Take pour violon et violoncelle, avec le violoncelliste Anssi Karttunen et le violoniste Ernst Kovacic au Festival Musica Nova d’Helsinki en 2015.
Fire and Ice (2015) was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center for its 75th anniversary. The text is a famous lyric by Robert Frost:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
This rather terrifying poem was inspired by contemporaneous astronomical theories of the sun's evolution and by a scene in Dante's Inferno. My six-minute setting is in ABABABA form. In the A sections, the voice and bass mingle in the middle register.
Each time the voice states the entire poem and follows ordinary speech prosody, the first time in a literal iambic setting, the second and third times in stylized renditions of Richard Burton's and Robert Frost's readings, respectively, and the fourth time in imitation of an anonymous reading that I found on the internet.
In the B sections, the voice desperately utters syllabic fragments against an inexorable bass line. The voice and bass fan out progressively, until, by the final B section, the bass is at the bottom of its register and the voice at its top (a "Queen of the Night" high F). These registral extremes embody the opposition of fire and ice.
Fred Lerdahl
(1943)
The composer Fred Lerdahl studied at Lawrence University, Princeton and Tanglewood.
He taught at the University of California (Berkeley), Harvard and Michigan, and since 1991 at Columbia University, where he is the "Fritz Reiner Professor" of the Department of Music.
He received several awards for his music, including the Koussevitzky Composition Prize, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a grant from Guggenheim Fellowship.
Commissions are passed from the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Spoleto Festival, National Endowment for the Arts, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, and others.
Among the orchestras and organizations that perform or program his works including the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Eighth Blackbird, Speculum Musicae, Collage, Antares, the Juilliard Quartet, the Pro Arte Quartet, Ensemble XXI, Lontano and the Venice Biennale.
He lived in many residences: the Marlboro Music Festival, IRCAM, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the American Academy in Rome, the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, the Yellow Barn Music Festival, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Lerdahl is also recognized as a music theorist. He has written two books, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (with the linguist Ray Jackendoff) and Tonal Pitch Space, in which, for each of them, listening to music appears as a model of perspective in the field of cognitive science.
NOTICE
"Spirals" (2006) for chamber orchestra, consists of two movements of equal length, the first rapid and tonic, the second comparatively slow and lyrical. The instrumentation is for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano and strings (6-6-4-4-2).
The title refers to a form of technique, my invention in which a small simple idea gradually develops varied and complex models, each developing cycle expanding the spiral. Halfway between each movement, the cycle reverses and contracts back to its point of origin, while the musical ideas continue to grow.