Biography
Three consuming passions shape the creative existence of Augusta Read Thomas. Composition functions for her not as a career choice but as an elemental requirement, one that began at age four and now sustains her physical and mental life alongside air and rest. A parallel drive compels her to connect: her scores function as only half of an exchange whose vivid hues and bold motions imply the attentive partner she envisions. Between the acts of creation and reception lies a further, steady intensity that finds its clearest expression not in technical commentary but in W.B. Yeats’s essay on Shelley, where he wrote that “voices would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life.” Although Yeats addressed a literary disposition, the phrase maps precisely onto Thomas’s own practice, whose characteristic gesture might be pictured as a single voice opening outward into luminous multiplicity or as an urgent recitative that gathers its own resonances into dense, self-generated polyphony. The violin concerto Spirit Musings embodies this process with particular clarity.
Born in 1964 in Glen Cove near New York City, Thomas grew up in a household alive with contrasting sounds—the Beatles in one room, Bach in another. Early lessons on trumpet accompanied her first efforts at writing music. She pursued composition at Northwestern University with William Karlins and Alan Stout, continued at Yale with Jacob Druckman, and completed studies at the Royal Academy of Music in England. The Guggenheim Fellowship arrived in 1989, shortly after she left the Academy. Returning to the United States, she joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music in 1993, remaining until 2001, and served as Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2006; during the first years of that appointment she helped launch the orchestra’s MusicNOW series. Several major scores—Words of the Sea, Orbital Beacons, Ceremonial, and the piano concerto Aurora—were written for the Chicago Symphony in this period.
The Rub of Love and Love Songs appeared on Chanticleer’s 1999 album Colors of Love, which received a Grammy Award. Astral Canticle, another Chicago Symphony commission from 2005, was named a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. After leaving Eastman, Thomas taught at Northwestern from 2001 to 2006 and later joined the advisory board for the Dean of Music. In 2010 the University of Chicago appointed her University Professor of Composition, the sixteenth person to receive that distinction from the institution. She founded the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago and, in 2016, inaugurated the Ear Taxi Festival, a six-day celebration of the city’s new-music community; both initiatives led to her selection as Chicagoan of the Year. Thomas belongs to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Nimbus label released Bell Illuminations, a survey of her works, in 2022.
Born in 1964 in Glen Cove near New York City, Thomas grew up in a household alive with contrasting sounds—the Beatles in one room, Bach in another. Early lessons on trumpet accompanied her first efforts at writing music. She pursued composition at Northwestern University with William Karlins and Alan Stout, continued at Yale with Jacob Druckman, and completed studies at the Royal Academy of Music in England. The Guggenheim Fellowship arrived in 1989, shortly after she left the Academy. Returning to the United States, she joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music in 1993, remaining until 2001, and served as Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2006; during the first years of that appointment she helped launch the orchestra’s MusicNOW series. Several major scores—Words of the Sea, Orbital Beacons, Ceremonial, and the piano concerto Aurora—were written for the Chicago Symphony in this period.
The Rub of Love and Love Songs appeared on Chanticleer’s 1999 album Colors of Love, which received a Grammy Award. Astral Canticle, another Chicago Symphony commission from 2005, was named a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. After leaving Eastman, Thomas taught at Northwestern from 2001 to 2006 and later joined the advisory board for the Dean of Music. In 2010 the University of Chicago appointed her University Professor of Composition, the sixteenth person to receive that distinction from the institution. She founded the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago and, in 2016, inaugurated the Ear Taxi Festival, a six-day celebration of the city’s new-music community; both initiatives led to her selection as Chicagoan of the Year. Thomas belongs to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Nimbus label released Bell Illuminations, a survey of her works, in 2022.
Albums
