March: Composer Ursula Mamlok

March is Women's History Month and we'll be celebrating Women composers on KPAC and KTXI...to start, here is a profile on Ursula Mamlok by host John Clare.

"My main concern is that the music should convey the various emotions in it with clarity and conviction. It interests me to accomplish this with a minimum of material, transforming it in such multiple way so as to give the impression of ever-new ideas that are like the flowers of a plant, all related yet each one different."

The American composer Ursula Mamlok is a distinguished representative of the Central European Jewish intellectual culture that was transplanted to the United States as a result of the Holocaust. Mamlok was born in 1928 in Berlin and came to the U.S. in 1941. She studied with George Szell at the Mannes College of Music, and received her B.M. and M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music, where she was a pupil of Vittorio Giannini. Among her other teachers were Roger Sessions, Stefan Wolpe, and Ralph Shapey, who exercised a particularly strong influence on the development of her com-positional technique. Her study of twelve tone music afforded her to employ Arnold Schönberg‘s system, however modified to suit her own work.

Ursula Mamlok taught composition at New York Univer sity, Temple University, City University and over 40 years composition at the Manhattan School of Music. Her work list encompasses over 60 works: for orchestra, chamber music, vocal music, compositions for solo instruments as well as music for children. Her works are published by C.F. Peters New York, Mc Ginnis and Marx, Theodore Presser and Furore. Since 2006, Ursula Mamlok lives at her birthplace, Berlin.

John Clare spoke with Mamlok about her music and the first volume of her music on Bridge Records. Listen to their conversation here. [mp3 file]
Volume Two has now been released on Bridge Records!