Discipline: Music Composition

Stanley Hollingsworth

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Sacramento, CA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1953, 1955, 1959, 1960, 1973, 1974
Stanley Hollingsworth (1924-2003) was an American composer and teacher. He was a student of composer Darius Milhaud from 1944–46, and of Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948–50. As a composer he is probably best known for his operatic trilogy of children's stories: The Mother, The Selfish Giant, and Harrison Loved his Umbrella. Hollingsworth was conversant in all the vocal and instrumental forms, examples of which are his Five Songs (1960) for solo voice and piano, Death Be Not Proud (1978) for mixed chorus and piano or orchestra, Sonata for Oboe (1949), and his Concerto for Piano (1980). A notable success was achieved with his opera La Grande Breteche when it was commissioned for broadcast by the NBC Opera Theatre in 1957. Hollingsworth was also honored with the Rome Prize (1958), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1958), and residencies at the Montalvo Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Yaddo Arts Colony, Wolf Trap, and the Ossaba Island Project. He received commissions from the Curtis Institute, Fedora Horowitz, Meadowbrook Music festival, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught composition and orchestration at the Curtis Institute of Music as an assistant to Gian Carlo Menotti from 1949–1955, was a lecturer at San Jose State College (now San Jose State University) on composition, harmony, counterpoint and piano 1961–63. From 1963 to 1970 he composed and orchestrated for the Harkness Ballet, followed by acting as an operatic and stage director in Austria and Turkey from 1970–72.

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Stanley Hollingsworth 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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