By MARGALIT FOXJUNE 10, 2014
Elodie Lauten, an American composer known for her operatic setting of the work of Allen Ginsberg, died on June 3 in Manhattan. She was 63.
The cause was cancer, her publicist, Jeffrey James, said.
Ms. Lauten’s style, which incorporated elements of minimalism, pop, jazz, blues, classical composition, electronic music and improvisation — and often combined traditional orchestral instruments with ambient sounds like bird song, sirens and amplified heartbeats — defied handy categorization. While not every critic warmed to that style, many praised her as a skilled melodist who could write music of surprising, satisfying consonance in a dissonant age.
Widely recorded, her work was performed at the Lincoln Center Festival, the New York City Opera, the Whitney Museum, La MaMa, the Kitchen and Theater for the New City, all in Manhattan, and at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, among other places.
Ms. Lauten’s best-known composition, “Waking in New York,” is a chamber-opera setting of a cycle of poems by Ginsberg about the life of the city and its people. Scored for voices, strings, flute, percussion and synthesizer, it received its premiere in 1999. (Ginsberg, a friend and mentor, supplied her with the libretto in 1996 but did not live to see the opera performed: He died the next year.)
Reviewing a 2001 performance of the work by the Downtown Chamber and Opera Players for The New York Times, Allan Kozinn wrote: “Ms. Lauten has treated Ginsberg’s poetry and its underlying spirit carefully, even reverently. She tucked his personal and sometimes diarylike texts into her own agreeably melodic and eclectic style, but she also appears to have listened carefully for traces of the music that animated Ginsberg’s soul.”
Ms. Lauten reworked the opera many times after its premiere. The most recent version, which she considered definitive, received its first performance, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village, two days before her death.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/arts/music/elodie-lauten-who-wove-opera-from-allen-ginsbergs-poetry-dies-at-63.html?_r=0
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