Discipline: Music Composition

Ernst Toch

Discipline: Music Composition
MacDowell Fellowships: 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957
Ernst Toch (1887 – 1964) was an Austrian composer of classical music and film scores. He sought throughout his life to introduce new approaches to music. His first compositions date from c. 1900 and were pastiches in the style of Mozart (quartets, 1905 album verses for piano). His first quartet was performed in Leipzig in 1908, and his sixth (Opus 12, 1905) in the year 1909. That year, his Chamber Symphony in F major (written 1906) won the Frankfurt/Main Mozart prize. Since then, Toch dedicated himself to being a full-time composer. He won the Mendelssohn prize for composition in 1910. During his residence in California, he was a professor at the University of Southern California, where he taught both music and philosophy. He was also a guest lecturer at Harvard University. He wrote a book on music theory, The Shaping Forces in Music (1948). From 1950 on, he composed seven symphonies. In these later works, he returned to the late Romantic style of his early years. Toch was considered one of the great avant-garde composers in the pre-Nazi era. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1956 for his Third Symphony (premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on December 2, 1955).

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Ernst Toch worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.

In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…

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