Elodie Lauten

Elodie Lauten (born October 20, 1950) is a composer described as postminimalist or a microtonalist. Born in Paris, France, Lauten was classically trained as a pianist since age 7. She received a Master's in composition from New York University where she studied Western composition with Dinu Ghezzo and Indian classical music with Ahkmal Parwez. She became an American citizen in 1984 and has lived in New York since the early seventies. Lauten has received awards from the NEA, ASCAP, MTC, and AMC, as well as chamber and orchestral commissions. She owns a recording label and publishing, Studio 21, and produces CDs for other artists on a regular basis. In France she is known by some happy-few to have contributed to the early punk-rock scéne in Paris in 1975/76. Lauten is a former student of her father Errol Parker and of LaMonte Young, Dinu Ghezzo, and Akhmal Parwez. A writer of operas, theater pieces, orchestral, chamber and instrumental music, she is recognized in North America and Europe as a pioneer of postminimalism and a force on the new music scene with over 20 releases on a number of labels including Lovely Music, Point/Polygram, 4-Tay, O.O. Discs, and New Tone (Italy). Her music has a strong mystical streak, reflected in correspondences between astrological signs, hexagrams of the I Ching, animals, and the modes of her system of improvisation, called Universal Mode Improvisation (UMI). Lauten's music has always been a combination of two contradictory streams, one of them a cloudy, beatless stasis derived from minimalism, the other a neoclassical attachment to tonal melody and ostinato. These two were present from the beginning of her recording career, the first in her Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory (1984), the second in her Sonata Ordinaire (1986) for piano. Her 1987 opera The Death of Don Juan—feminist tract and Zen meditation combined—was one of the major postminimalist works of the 1980s; it has recently been revived in a 2-week run (April 2005) at Franklin Pierce College, NH, directed by Robert Lawson.Her neoclassical tendency blossomed into a full neo-baroque idiom in her Deus ex Machina Cycle for voices and Baroque ensemble (1999). Variations On The Orange Cycle (1991, recorded by Lois Svard for Lovely Music in 1998) is one of the cloudier works, an improvisation in a Terry Riley-ish vein that was recorded and transcribed (as few of her piano works have been) for performance by others. The work has been included in Chamber Music America's list of 100 best works of the 20th century. Lauten's opera Waking in New York, written on poems by her late friend Allen Ginsberg, was presented by the New York City Opera VOX and Friends 2004, after being released on 4Tay in 2003. Smoothly suave but with a gentle rock beat, the work pioneered a mixture of genres by combining vocal soloists from three styles: classical, Broadway, and gospel. Orfreo, an opera for Baroque ensemble, was premiered at Merkin Hall by the Queen's Chamber Band, who also included Lauten's The Architect in their CD New Music Alive (Capstone, 2004). Orfreo was released on CD in December 2004 (Studio 21). In 2004 Lauten was composer-in-residence at Hope College, MI.Lauten's Symphony 2001 was premiered in February 2003 by the SEM Orchestra in New York. Some of her compositions are for an instrument called the "trine", a lyre-like instrument she designed.