Michael Charles Colgrass was an American and Canadian musician, composer, and educator.
14 Facts About Michael Colgrass
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Michael Colgrass was an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
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Michael Colgrass graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in percussion performance and composition, including studies with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Festival and Lukas Foss at Tanglewood.
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Michael Colgrass served two years as timpanist in the US Seventh Army Symphony in Stuttgart.
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Michael Colgrass spent eleven years supporting his composition activities as a free-lance percussionist in the city of New York, where his performance experiences included such varied groups as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, The Metropolitan Opera, Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Recording Orchestra's Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera, and jazz ensembles.
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Michael Colgrass organized the percussion sections for Gunther Schuller's recordings and concerts, as well as for recordings and premieres of new works by John Cage, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varese, and Harry Partch; and he performed with Partch's ensemble.
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The Michael Colgrass family decided to relocate to Toronto in 1970 primarily because of street crime, labor strikes, and civil chaos then rampant in the city of New York, an urban quality-of-life crisis that reached its peak under Mayor John Vliet Lindsay.
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Michael Colgrass won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his symphonic piece Deja vu, which was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic.
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Michael Colgrass's work was featured on the Mark Hetzler 2015 recording Blues, Ballads and Beyond.
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Michael Colgrass devised a system of teaching music creativity to children; he taught this to middle- and high-school music teachers, who have in turn used his techniques to teach children to write and perform new music of their own creation.
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Michael Colgrass wrote a number of works for children to perform.
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Michael Colgrass lived in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for nearly five decades, while earning his living internationally as a composer.
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Michael Colgrass's widow, Ulla, is a journalist and editor who writes about music and the arts; and his son Neal is an editor, journalist, and screenwriter.
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Michael Colgrass wrote, in collaboration with his wife and son, Adventures of an American Composer: An Autobiography, published in 2010.