Jacob Avshalomov

[1] His father was Aaron Avshalomov, the Siberian-born composer known for "oriental musical materials cast in western forms and media"; his mother was from San Francisco.

[1] At eight years old Avshalomov visited Portland from China with his parents and were guests of Jacques Gershkovitch for several months in 1927.

[2] Avshalomov graduated from British and American schools before age fifteen, then worked as a factory supervisor in Tientsin, Shanghai and Beijing over a span of four years.

He then enlisted with a British volunteer corps following Japan's invasion of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and eventually returned to the United States with his mother in December 1937.

[5] During World War II he lived in London, where he conducted a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion.

[1] Following the war, Avshalomov received the Ditson Fellowship and joined faculty of the music department at Columbia University, where he taught from 1946 to 1954.

[citation needed] Other commissioned works include "The Thirteen Clocks", "Glorious th'Assembled Fires", and "Symphony of Songs".

Awards recipients had a granite star placed on Main Street by Antoinette Hatfield Hall and were presented with a bronze folly bollard.