Joyce Music: Fred Lerdahl

As much as possible, I want each of my pieces to create and have its own world.
—Fred Lerdahl, 1992

Fred Lerdahl
(b. 1943)

Alfred Whitford Lerdahl was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1943. He began composing at the age of 14. Lerdahl obtained his MFA in 1967 at Princeton University, where he studied with Milton Babbitt and Earl Kim. He also studied with Roger Sessions at Tanglewood, and earned a Fulbright Scholarship to continue his work at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg/Breisgau. Teaching at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley, Lerdahl served as the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University from 1991 until 2018. He was also co-director of the Columbia Electronic Music Center. Lerdahl has authored several books about music theory, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music three times.

Lerdahl has always avoided being pigeon-holed into one style of composition. In 1992 he explained, “As a student growing up I went to Princeton, and total serialism, and the other -isms of the ’60s and early ’70s seemed quite arbitrary to me. I suppose I was a post-modernist in the making. They all seemed like arbitrary systems, and I wanted to recover for myself, intellectually and compositionally, things that felt natural, and that I had a reason to believe in.” His compositions have been praised for their ability to fuse traditional forms with modern idioms. Lerdahl counts among his musical influences Arnold Schönberg, Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, Eliot Carter, and György Ligeti.

Joyce-Related Works

Wake (1968)
This piece is arranged for soprano, harp, string trio, and percussion, with text taken from Finnegans Wake.

Additional Information

Fred Lerdahl Homepage
The composer’s homepage contains a biography and a detailed listing of his works and recordings.

Fred Lerdahl Academic Page
Lerdahl’s page at Columbia University.

Fred Lerdahl Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia hosts a modest page about Lerdahl.

Fred Lerdahl Interview
On 16 May 1992, the tireless Bruce Duffie interviewed Fred Lerdahl for WNIB.

Authors: Allen B. Ruch & Bill Winter
Last Modified: 30 October 2022
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