EQUINOX

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PETER DICKINSON listens to the music of Elliott Schwartz

The American composer Elliott Schwartz, now in his mid sixties, has had a genuinely international career for some forty years. Like Gershwin, Sessions and Copland he was born in Brooklyn, then went to Columbia University. He made his first impact abroad on the front line with a work called Signals (1968) which was included in one of the boxed sets of six LPs called Avant Garde that DG brought out in the later 1960s. But we weren't easily fooled - he'd published a book, The Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams, in 1964 (reprinted by Da Capo Press in 1981). Schwartz is now Robert K. Beckwith Professor of Music at Bowdoin College, Maine, which has been his base since 1964. He has had many connections with the UK, with a spell at Trinity College of Music in London and several residencies at Cambridge. Schwartz's sixtieth birthday was celebrated by special events in various parts of the world. The London concert at the British Music Information Centre contained tributes specially written by Simon Bainbridge and Robert Saxton and premières from Michael Finnissy, Peter Dickinson and Kate Romano which were all played by the composers.

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