Discipline: Music Composition

Ellsworth Milburn

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Houston, TX
MacDowell Fellowships: 1984, 1989
Ellsworth Milburn (1938-2007) was an American composer and pianist. Milborn began playing the piano as a child. He studied piano with Mildred Gardner and Karin Dayas and composition with Scott Huston, Paul Cooper, Henri Lazarof, and Darius Milhaud. While studying at the University of California, Los Angeles, he appeared as a jazz pianist for guest appearances with the improvisational theater group The Second City, Los Angeles. From 1963 to 1968 he was a permanent member and musical director of the San Francisco-based group The Committee, and in 1968 completed his master of arts degree at Mills College in Oakland, CA, followed by his doctorate in music from the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati in 1970. He then taught at the University of Cincinnati before following his colleagues Paul Cooper and Anne Schnoebelen to Rice University in 1975, where he founded the Shepherd School of Music with their support. Until 1999 he was professor of composition and music theory at Rice and taught Efraín Amaya and Stephen Yip among his students. Milborn composed mainly symphonic works and chamber music, including two string quartets. He received composition orders from The Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Concord String Quartet, and the Lark String Quartet, and has received four awards from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Studios

Veltin

Ellsworth Milburn worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

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