Happy birthday to longtime ACA member, highly-respected and much loved composer in the modernist tradition.
Raoul Pleskow was born in 1931 in
Vienna and educated in New York City. His principal teachers in
composition were Karol Rathaus, Otto Luening, and Stefan Wolpe. He has
been recipient of many honors, the most recent of which include awards
by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Martha Baird Rockefeller
Fund for Music, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a
fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
His works have been performed by the Cleveland Philharmonic, the
Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the Plainfield Symphony, the Orchestra de
Camera, the South Dakota Symphony, the Pierrot Consort, the Stony Brook
Contemporary Chamber Players, the Queens Symphony Orchestra and many
others. Commissions include those by the Chamber Players of the
Kennedy Center, the Aeolian Chamber Players, the New York Virtuosi,
Camarata, the North/South Consonance and the Unitarian Church of All
Souls. He was Chairman of the music department at C.W. Post University
from the late 1960s until 1994. His work can be found on CRI, Serenus,
Ars Nova-Ars Antiqua, Golden Crest, Centaur, CRS, Capstone, and
North-South Records.
Philadelphia Biblical Uni
Raoul Pleskowversity in Langhorne, PA, is the repository for the composer's manuscripts and other music files, while ACA will continue to publish works from the composer's active music catalog.
In the summer of 2011, Pleskow's works "Tre Ballati" and "Sextet with Voice" were premiered at Symphony Space, by the award-winning ensemble, Lunatics at Large.