Louise Juliette Talma was an American composer, academic, and pianist.
14 Facts About Louise Talma
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Louise Talma taught at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and at Hunter College.
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Louise Talma was the first woman in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the first woman awarded the Sibelius Medal for Composition.
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Louise Talma grew up surrounded by music but was an excellent science student and considered becoming a chemist before deciding on a career as a musician.
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Louise Talma received her Bachelor of Music degree from New York University in 1931 and her Master of Arts degree from Columbia in 1933.
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Louise Talma studied piano with Isidor Philipp at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, every summer from 1926 to 1935.
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Louise Talma taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York from the late 1920s.
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In 1926, after making a successful debut as a concert pianist in New York, Louise Talma spent her first summer at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, where she met pedagogue Nadia Boulanger.
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Under Boulanger's guidance, Louise Talma gave up her piano studies in order to focus on composition, converted from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism in 1934 with Boulanger as her godmother, and adopted a lifestyle similar to Boulanger's in its devotion to music.
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In 1952, Louise Talma heard Irving Fine's serial but tonally centered string quartet and immediately began working with serial approaches and techniques in her works.
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Louise Talma's setting of e e cummings's "Let's Touch the Sky" was her first completed serial work; her String Quartet, Piano Sonata No 2, and La Corona, a setting of John Donne's Holy Sonnets all use clearly audible serial elements.
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Louise Talma began working on a grand opera with writer Thornton Wilder in 1954 after the two had met while working at the MacDowell Colony.
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The Tolling Bell, Louise Talma's setting of texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne for baritone and orchestra, was completed in 1969 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music.
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Louise Talma died in Saratoga Springs, New York while working on an elegiac piece, The Lengthening Shadows, while in residence at the Yaddo colony.