Discipline: Music Composition

Aaron Avshalomoff

Discipline: Music Composition
MacDowell Fellowships: 1960
More: www.milkenarchive.org/artists/view/aaron-avshalomov
Aaron Avshalomoff (1894 - 1965) was a Russian-born Jewish composer from Nikolayevsk, Eastern Siberia. Avshalomoff briefly attended the Zürich Conservatory, which acted as his only formal music education. After the October Revolution in 1917, his family sent him to the United States via Manchuria and northern China. He remained in China until 1947, where he began studying Chinese music and combining elements of Chinese music with his Russian influences such as Rimsky-Korsakov. This method of composition produced his first opera, Kuan Yin, which premiered in Peking in 1925. During Avshalomoff’s time in the U.S., he achieved some performances, but chose to return to China where he became the conductor for the Shanghai City Symphony. He went on to write two additional operas and concertos for violin and piano. He then moved back to the U.S. where he premiered his Dream of Wei Lin and received a commission for his Third Symphony from Serge Koussevitzky.

Studios

Monday Music

Aaron Avshalomoff worked in the Monday Music studio.

Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, NJ, Monday Music Studio is sited next to an enormous boulder deposited by glaciers thousands of years ago. A small dormer once pierced the east slope of the roof, but after damage suffered in the 1938 hurricane, the roof was rebuilt without the dormer. The interior…

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