Discipline: Music Composition

Frank Wigglesworth

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1964, 1972, 1984
More: composers.com/composers/frank-wigglesworth
Frank Wigglesworth (1918-1996) was a composer, conductor, performer, and teacher who was a resident of New York's Greenwich Village for more than 40 years. He went on to study composition with Otto Luening, Henry Cowell, and Ernest White at Columbia University and Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C. In 1946, he joined the faculty of the Greenwich House Music School, where he was associated with (and later studied with) the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Columbia University, and in 1954, after spending four years in Europe as a recipient of the Prix de Rome, he began teaching at Queens College and the New School for Social Research. Wigglesworth was a Composer in Residence at the American Academy of Rome from 1969-1970 and at the Bennington Chamber Music Conference in 1975 and 1985. He served on many boards, including MacDowell from 1985-1988 and the Youth Orchestra of New York. He was also the founder of the Thursday Evening Concerts at the Greenwich House Music School, organized in 1987. Wigglesworth was president of the American Composers Alliance from 1980-1984.

Studios

New Jersey

Frank Wigglesworth worked in the New Jersey studio.

The yellow clapboard New Jersey Studio, located on a grassy, sloping site, was funded by the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and built as an exact replica of Monday Music Studio (1913). The studio’s porch rests on fieldstone piers that increase in height as the ground slopes to the west. Like Monday Music Studio, New Jersey…

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