Composer and Educator Ursula Mamlok Dies at 93
May 04, 2016
Composer Ursula Mamlok, known for music that marries conventional tonality to a modernist aesthetic, died on May 4, 2016. She was 93 and visiting Berlin. Mamlok wrote over 75 works, including compositions for orchestra, chamber ensemble, chorus, and soloist. A beloved teacher, she was also the author of numerous pedagogic works.
“Ursula Mamlok was a singular composer,” said Milken Archive of Jewish Music founder Lowell Milken, “whose originality stemmed from her pursuit of clarity over convention. She will be missed.”
Ursula Mamlok (née Meyer) was born in 1923 in Berlin, where at the age of 12 she began studying piano, composition, theory, and counterpoint with Gustav Ernst, lecturer at Fredrich Wilhelms University (now Humboldt University), and with Emily Weissgerber. Shaken by the nationwide pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht, her family migrated to Ecuador in 1939 after being informed that quotas for immigration to the United States were full. Relocating to New York in 1940, Mamlok embarked on a four-year course of study in composition with George Szell at the Mannes School of Music, followed by studies with Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned her B.M. and M.M.
Searching for a musical language beyond that of the common practice period in which she was steeped, Mamlok explored the possibilities of twelve-tone method, which she first encountered at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1944, then a haven for modernists like composer Roger Sessions and pianist Edward Steuremann, both of whom would become her teachers. Complementing her affinity for the late romantic and neoclassical styles of Hindemith and Stravinsky, the music she experienced that summer – including the serial works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern – opened up new vistas of creative possibility. Through selective studies with composers like Sessions, Gunther Schuller, Ralph Shapey, and Stefan Wolpe, she was able to loosen the grasp of her early training and find the tools she needed to develop her own voice as a composer.
Initially feeling “caught between two worlds” – those of tonality and dodecaphony – Mamlok eventually cut her own path, one that embedded the techniques of twelve-tone serialism within a musical language accessible to non-specialist listeners. She achieved this by recourse to older structures that emphasize repetition and symmetry, like ternary, rondo, and arch forms, and by establishing motivic and thematic continuities. While constructing her works with the methods of serialism, she also expressed “a preference for chord progressions,” which lent some of her works the impression of tonality. Ultimately, it was not technique, but rather clarity and economy of expression that were her priorities. “I like my music to be very clear, and I like it to have character, to tell a story,” she said in a 1994 interview with Janelle Gelfand, “The listener has to come away from my music with a feeling of being moved by it…emotion has to be expressed.” Music should not be “an abstract, technical feat,” she stated, but rather “technique should be subordinated to the expression.”
Many of Mamlok’s early works remain significant, including Grasshoppers, for piano (1956) and later for orchestra (1957); Arabesque (1961), for solo flute, her first composition using Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method; and String Quartet No. 1 (1962), written under the tutelage of Ralph Shapey. But the pieces from that era for which she expressed the most fondness were Cantata based on the First Psalm (1958) and the Woodwind Quintet (1961). Among her most performed scores are Panta rhei (Time in Flux, 1981), for piano trio; Der Andreas Garten (1987), for flute, harp, and mezzo-soprano, set to poetry by her husband, Gerard Mamlok; Girasol (Sunflowers, 1990), for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, violoncello, and piano; and Constellations (1993), for orchestra, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony.
Mamlok’s work has been released in numerous volumes on Gasparo Records, CRI/New World Records, Bridge Records, and Naxos, among others. Her Cantata based on the First Psalm (1958), for chorus (SATB) and organ, appears on the Milken Archive’s digital album Volume 18 (2): Psalms and Canticles – Jewish Choral Art in America (2013). It is her only explicitly Jewish-themed work: “I wrote it to express that spiritual side of me,” she said in a 1998 interview with the Milken Archive, “which may not be apparent in my other music.” Never before performed publicly, the work was given its world premier by the Milken Archive on this recording by the Laudibus Choir. \A documentary film about her life and music was released in 2014.
Mamlok was gifted educator, holding faculty positions at New York University (1967-76), Kingsborough Community College (1972-75), City University of New York, Temple University, and the Manhattan School (from 1974), where she taught for more than forty years. Mamlok received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; grants from the Fromm Foundation, the American Guild of Organists, and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music; commissions from organizations including the Koussevitzky Foundation and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra; and honors from BMI and the National Flute Association, among others. In 2006 she was honored with a festival and symposium at the Manhattan School of Music and in 2013, on her 90th birthday, her works were performed at the Philharmonie in Berlin, where later that same year she received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany First Class.
The Milken Archive of Jewish Music mourns the loss of Ursula Mamlok. May her artistic gifts continue to inspire.
