Morten Lauridsen

Performances, recordings, and published scores have made the compositions of American composer and educator Morten Lauridsen familiar across the United States and internationally. Choral settings dominate his catalog, though he has produced occasional pieces combining voices with instruments. His personal style remains tonal and melodic while staying serene and economical, covering both sacred and secular themes. More than 200 albums feature his music, among them the 2024 release Prayer: The Songs of Morten Lauridsen.

Morten Johannes Lauridsen, III entered the world in Colfax, Washington. His father, Morten Johannes Lauridsen, Jr., moved from employment with the U.S. Forest Service to a position at the Internal Revenue Service, and the younger Lauridsen spent time as a young man staffing a remote fire lookout tower. He first studied at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. After turning to composition, he relocated to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn, and Ingolf Dahl served as his teachers. Following receipt of a graduate degree in 1967, he joined the USC faculty and remained there throughout his teaching career until retirement in 2019. Between 1990 and 2002 he chaired the composition department and created a program devoted to film and television scoring. His compositions began reaching audiences while he was still a student, including the 1965 song cycle A Backyard Universe for tenor and piano. During the 1970s and 1980s, after facing personal and creative challenges, he explored multiple approaches, among them 12-tone serialism.

His 1994 appointment as composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale increased his output and drew wider notice to his music both domestically and abroad. The motet O magnum mysterium, written that year and released in choral as well as voice-and-piano editions, ranks among his best-known pieces and has received numerous recordings by groups that include the singers of the La Maîtrise de Notre-Dame choir school in Paris and the Härlanda Chamber Choir in Sweden. Lauridsen has appeared as a guest composer at more than 100 American colleges and universities. He keeps a residence on an island off Washington’s Pacific coast, where much of his creative work takes place. Another widely performed score is the non-liturgical requiem mass Lux Aeterna. A 2008 Los Angeles Master Chorale recording of that work became one of five Lauridsen albums nominated for a Grammy award. The Chamber Choir of Europe’s 2018 release Light Eternal: The Choral Music of Morten Lauridsen also included the piece and helped introduce his music to listeners overseas. In 2024 Welsh baritone Jeremy Huw Williams brought out Prayer: The Songs of Morten Lauridsen. By that point, recordings had documented well over 40 of his compositions. Copies of his sheet music continue to rank among steady best-sellers, and ensembles of every size maintain his works in their active repertories. The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts designated Lauridsen an American Choral Master in 2006, and President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of the Arts the following year.