Louise Talma
(born 1906)

JAMES R. BRISCOE

Louise Talma was born in Arcachon, France, and came to the United States in her teens. At the Institute of Musical Art in New York, she studied counterpoint and composition with Percy Goetschius and Howard Brockway. She earned a bachelor’s degree in music from New York University in 1931 and a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1933. She attended the Fontainebleau School in France each summer from 1926 through 1939, serving in later years as the first American on the faculty. There she studied piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger. She had a distinguished career on the faculty of Hunter College in New York, from 1928 to 1979.

A pioneer among American women composers, Louise Talma has compiled a record of many “firsts”: she was the first woman to receive the Sibelius Medal for Composition, in 1963; she was the first woman to receive two Guggenheim awards in composition, in 1946 and 1947; she was the first woman composer to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1974; and she was the first American woman whose work was produced by a major European opera company—The Alcestiad, in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1962. Her other, numerous awards include the Prix d’Excellence de Composition from the French government, a Senior Fulbright Research Grant for the composition of The Alcestiad, major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and honorary doctoral degrees from Hunter and Bard colleges. Since 1943 Talma has worked regularly at the MacDowell Colony for composers in New Hampshire, which has played a major role in her creativity. Beyond her recognition as the dean of contemporary American women composers, she is renowned, as she deserves to be, as a foremost American composer—without the qualification “female.”

Louise Talma has composed in all genres. Her three-act opera The Alcestiad, based on a text by Thornton Wilder, was composed in 1958. Among large choral works, Talma’s oratorio The Divine Flame (1948), her triptych The Tolling Bell (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1970), and her Mass in English (1984) have received important acclaim. Her Toccata for Orchestra, Alleluia in Form of Toccata for Piano, Piano Sonata Number 1, and Piano Sonata Number 2 have been recorded and frequently performed. Louise Talma is represented primarily by the publisher Carl Fischer.

Louise Talma is an outstanding representative of main tendencies in twentieth- century composition in the United States. In general, she is a neoclassicist, although with her Six Etudes for piano (1954), she began to use a serial approach. With The Alcestiad she began to combine serial and tonal elements. In regard to broad stylistic predilections and adaptations, she therefore parallels Stravinsky and Copland.

On the genesis of La Corona (Seven Sonnets by John Donne), Talma says:

The work came to be written by way of a suggestion made to me in 1954 by Donald Aird, who was then connected with the Illinois Wesleyan University Collegiate Choir. He asked if I had ever thought of setting this sonnet sequence, at the time unknown to me. I looked into it and was immediately struck by the interesting form the repeated lines could give to the music. The set is literally a “corona,” in that the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next one, and the last line of the last one is the first line of the first one. This is, of course, carried out in the music. I was commissioned to write the work by the Illinois Wesleyan Choir. Its first New York performance [and perhaps its premiere—ed.] was given on November 19, 1964, by the Dorian Chorale, Harold Aks, conductor.

Holy Sonnets

LA CORONA

Texts by John Donne

Louise Talma

Reprinted from the original manuscript, by permission of the composer.

ANNUNCIATION

NATIVITIE

TEMPLE

GRUCIFYING

RESURRECTION

ASCENTION