Eric Salzman
Eric Salzman (September 8, 1933) is an American composer, author, impresario, music critic, and record producer.
After studying composition with Morris Mawner at the New York High School of Music and Art (1949–51), he continued his studies at Columbia University (BA 1954), where his teachers included Jack Beeson, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. He pursued postgraduate work at Princeton University (MFA 1956) with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. A Fulbright Fellowship (1956–8) enabled him to study with Goffredo Petrassi, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono in Europe.
In 1958 he returned to the USA and began a career as a music critic, writing for the New York Times (1958–62), the New York Herald Tribune (1962–6) and Stereo Review (from 1966); he won the Sang Prize for Criticism in the Fine Arts in 1969. From 1975 to 1990 he produced and directed over two dozen recordings (mainly for the Nonesuch label), several of which received Grammy Award nominations; these feature works by composers such as Weill, Partch and Bolcom, as well as his own music. From 1984 to 1991 he was editor of the Musical Quarterly. He served as co-founder and artistic director of the American Music Theatre Festival, Philadelphia (1982–93). He currently is the Associate Artistic Director at the Center for Contemporary Opera.
His teaching appointments have included positions at Queens College, CUNY (1966–8), the Institute for Studies in American Music (Brooklyn, New York) and New York University (from 1982 to ?).
Salzman's compositions include "Nude Paper Sermon" and a series of music theater pieces, notably the opera Civilization and its Discontents (with Michael Sahl), which won the 1980 Italia Prize and has been recorded for Nonesuch (reissued as CD on Labor Records, January 2012). He is the author of Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction (Prentice-Hall, 1967; 4th edition, 2001) which has become a widely-used textbook in university courses on modern music. He also published an essay on the new music-theater movement, "Music-Theater Defined: It's ...Well...Um..." [1]
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[edit] Sources
- James P. Cassaro. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie (1992), ISBN 0-333-73432-7 and ISBN 1-56159-228-5
- The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, by John Warrack and Ewan West (1992), ISBN 0-19-869164-5
- Randel, Don, ed. The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music. Cambridge: Belknap, 1996, p. 781.
