LENI ALEXANDER - POLAND
BORN 8 JUNE
Helene Alexander Pollak was born in Breslau, and her family lived in Hamburg and then emigrated to Chile in 1939 to escape the Nazis.
She studied piano under the Montessori system of music and received a diploma in 1942 for teaching and worked with youth and disabled children while developing an interest in composition. Between 1949 and 1953, she studied with Fré Focke, Rene Leibowitz, and Olivier Messiaen. Between 1963 and 1968, she also studied electronic music and wrote a number of electronic pieces.
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and lived for several years in Paris and Cologne. Besides new music classical compositions and musical theater, Alexander was active in composition for television soundtracks and composed for soap opera. In her later years, she composed several "hörspiel" pieces, or "plays for listening", several of them for the WDR Radio of Cologne.
Alexander's compositions were mainly instrumental and were performed by orchestras in countries including Chile, Italy, France and the United States.
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Méralo by Leni Alexander
MARGARET BUECHNER - USA
BORN8 JUNE
Margaret Buechner was a German-born American composer.
Born in Hanover, she emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became an American citizen in 1961. She had studied composition and composed chamber music before the war; after she came to America, her teacher, Otto Luening, encouraged Buechner to write symphonic music.
During the 1950s, her compositions emphasized ballet music scored for large orchestra. Her later compositions were dramatic symphonic and choral works, often with historical or patriotic themes. Her works include the ballets Phantomgreen and Elizabeth, along with tone poems The Old Swedes Church and Erlkönig(based on the Goethe poem). Other major works are two related to her adopted country: Liberty Bell for chorus and orchestra, which incorporates a 1959 recording of the actual bell by Columbia Records, and the "symphonic trilogy" The American Civil War. She died in Midland, Michigan, at the age of 76.
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