Passed on by Carson Cooman:

The American composer Robert Moevs died Monday evening, December 10, 2007 at age 87. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin on December 2, 1920, Moevs studied at Harvard University (BA, 1942). He entered the US Air Force and served as a pilot. He resumed his musical studies at the Paris Conservatoire (1947–51) and then at Harvard (MA, 1952); his principal teachers were Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger.

For the next three years he was at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow. An inspiring teacher, Moevs served on the faculty at Harvard (1955–63) and at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (1964–91). He was composer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome (1960‹61) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1963–4).
Awards made to him include one from the National Institute of Arts and Sciences (1956) and many from ASCAP; in 1978 he received the Stockhausen International Prize in Composition for his Concerto grosso for piano and orchestra, which was later recorded on the CRI label. Among the conductors who performed his works were Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Michael Gielen, Erich Leinsdorf, and Leon Botstein.

7 thoughts on “The December Jinx Continues”
  1. (Let’s try that again, in English…)
    Frank,

    I have quite a few Moevs works on LP at home that I have transferred onto disc if interested.

  2. We just posted a tribute to Robert Moevs by Richard Wilson on NewMusicBox. You can read it here.

    I’ve been trying to track down Moevs’ music—I know that some of it was issued on LP by CRI way back—but none of it seems to be in print.

Comments are closed.