Douglas Moore
Douglas Stuart Moore (August 10, 1893 – July 25, 1969) was an American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author.
The piece won him a competitive Joseph Pulitzer National Traveling Scholarship which funded further composition studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1926.
He was rapidly promoted at Columbia from adjunct faculty to professor and head of the music department at Barnard College in 1927; thanks in large part to the success of his orchestral suite The Pageant of P.T.
His next folk opera to achieve success was The Devil and Daniel Webster which premiered on Broadway in 1939 and was based on the 1936 short story of the same name by Pulitizer Prize winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét.
[4] Moore's father made a living as a publisher of among other things the literary magazine Ladies' World; a business which he sold to S. S. McClure upon his retirement in 1913.
[5] While there were no professional musicians in Moore's family, his mother was an amateur pianist who also sang in the women's chorus of Brooklyn's Chaminade Society (CS).
These included friendships with Archibald MacLeish, who became a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, writer, and the ninth Librarian of Congress; Donald Oenslager, who became a Tony Award winning scenic designer; Henry Luce, who founded the magazines Time, Life, and Fortune; and Emily Bailey, whom Moore eventually married in 1920.
[2] He quickly gained a reputation at Yale for writing humorous songs; one of which, "Naomi: The Restaurant Queen", was performed by actress Ethel Green in her vaudeville act and was published by Charles F. Smith in 1912.
[12] Yale being an all-male school at that time, he often portrayed female characters on stage in drag, such as Mabel Chilters in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.
[12] Moore developed close friendships with several fellow students in these performance groups, including Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, and Cole Porter.
[12] His father was a millionaire, and left Moore a considerable fortune which allowed him to freely pursue his music interests and live comfortably with the services of a butler and cook for the rest of his life.
[13] His songs demonstrated music influences from Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, American folk tunes, and minstrel shows.
[3] After leaving the Navy, Moore pursued graduate studies at the Schola Cantorum de Paris from 1919 through 1921, where his teachers included Vincent d'Indy (composition) and Charles Tournemire (organ).
[14] While a student in Paris, Moore returned to the United States to wed Emily Bailey, a close friend since his Hotchkiss days, on 16 September 1920 at Martha's Vineyard.
[16] Moore made his first significant professional contribution as a composer and conductor on November 15, 1923; conducting the premiere of his Four Museum Pieces with the Cleveland Orchestra.
[2] Well received at its premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra under Nikolai Sokoloff on 28 March 1926, this work was the first piece by Moore to bring the composer recognition among the broader public.
[20] In 1925 he composed incidental music for a production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night on a commission from Richard Boleslawski's American Laboratory Theatre (ALT).
[21] He continued to compose incidental music for the ALT in succeeding years for productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Robert E. Sherwood's The Road to Rome in 1927.
From the autumn of 1925 through the spring of 1926 Moore studied composition with Boulanger in Paris after being awarded a Joseph Pulitzer National Traveling Scholarship in recognition of his Four Museum Pieces.
[21] The most important of these was the Ballad of William Sycmamore which used text by Stephen Vincent Benét, and was scored for baritone voice, flute, trombone, and piano.
[19] He was rapidly promoted from adjunct faculty member to assistant professor at the wider Columbia University and head of the music department at Barnard College specifically on July 1, 1927.
[24] The book explained the basic elements of music: melody, harmony, polyphony, tonality, rhythm, and form with a suggested guide to recordings for listening and further reading.
[23] Moore also composed music for a planned play on American outlaw Jesse James for the ALT that year, but financial issues ultimately prevented that project from making it to the stage.
[23] Completed in 1931, the symphony was dedicated to composer and conductor Howard Hanson who conducted the Rochester Philharmonic in the work's premiere on April 2, 1931.
Program notes at the work's premiere indicate that the piece was meant to express musical ideas inspired by the "maligned" title character of the novel.
[24] Utilizing a sonata form structure, the overture uses the tune "Sweet Adeline" by Tin Pan Alley composer Henry W. Armstrong as a motif.
[9] In 1934 Moore was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which enabled him to spend time in Bermuda composing his first opera, White Wings, after the 1926 Broadway play by dramatist Philip Barry.
[9] The work was supposed to be mounted by the Federal Theatre Project in 1935, but a union strike by workers put an end to the planned staging.
Composed in the years 1937 through 1939, the work premiered at Broadway 's Martin Beck Theatre on 18 May 1939 in a double bill with Virgil Thomson's Filling Station.
Douglas Moore's music has been described as having a "modesty, grace and tender lyricism", especially marking the slower passages of many works, especially his Symphony in A major and the clarinet quintet.
