Gloria Coates

Gloria Coates was an American composer born in Wausau, Wisconsin, who spent a significant portion of her career in Germany. She began composing at the age of nine and pursued her musical education at Louisiana State University under Otto Luening, at Columbia University under Jack Beeson, and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg under Alexander Tcherepnin. She also took private lessons from Tcherepnin and later dedicated her First Symphony (1972–1973) to him. From 1969 until her death, she resided in Munich.

Coates played a vital role in bridging American and German musical cultures. She organized a series of German-American concerts featuring contemporary music in Munich from 1971 to 1984 and actively promoted American music on German radio stations in Munich, Cologne, and Bremen. In 1972, she presented her vocal experiments at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music. She is associated with post-minimalism and was influenced by composers such as György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Iannis Xenakis.

Her extensive body of work includes fifteen symphonies, nine string quartets, various symphonic and choral compositions such as a Te Deum (1961) and Missa brevis (1964), as well as electronic music. Additionally, she composed 15 songs based on poems by Emily Dickinson, and incidental music for plays by Hofmannsthal, Shakespeare, and Shaw. Gloria Coates passed away in Munich on August 19, 2023. Following her death, her family clarified that she was born in 1933, correcting the frequently cited date of 1938.

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