" Charles Wuorinen added several important works to the repertoire, Spinoff trio for double bass, violin and conga drums, and Trio for Bass Instruments doublebass, tuba and bass trombone, and in 2007 Synaxis for double bass, horn, oboe and clarinet with timpani and strings.

Important 20th century works have been written for string orchestra by Bartók ( Divertimento for String Orchestra ), Stravinsky ( Apollo ), Witold Lutosławski ( Musique funèbre ), Benjamin Britten ( Simple Symphony and Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge ), Charles Wuorinen ( Grand Bamboula ), and Malcolm Williamson ( Symphony No. 7 ).

Many of Wuorinen ’ s works were premiered by The Group, including Chamber Concerto for Cello and the Chamber Concerto for Flute.

In the 1980s Wuorinen began an association with the New York City Ballet which resulted in a series of works designed for dance, Five ( Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra ) for choreographer Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and Wuorinen's longtime colleague and champion Fred Sherry, Delight of the Muses based on works of Mozart and commissioned in honor of the Mozart Bicentennial and three works inspired by scenes from Dante ’ s la Divina Commedia for Peter Martins ( The Mission of Virgil, The Great Procession and The River of Light ).

Wuorinen has also been active as a performer, a pianist and a conductor of his own works as well as other 20th-century repertoire.

Serkin is a committed performer of new and recent music, having premiered or been the dedicatee of many new works by such composers as Takemitsu, Lieberson, Knussen, Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen.

His father, John H. Wuorinen, was chairman of the history department at Columbia University and a noted scholar of Scandinavian affairs who also worked for the Office of Strategic Services and was the author of five books on his native Finland.

In 1962 Wuorinen and fellow composer-performer Harvey Sollberger formed The Group for Contemporary Music.

Major Wuorinen compositions of the ' 60s include Orchestral and Electronic Exchanges, premiered by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Lukas Foss, the First Piano Concerto, with composer as soloist, the String Trio, written for the then newly formed new music ensemble Speculum Musicae, and Time's Encomium, Wuorinen ’ s only purely electronic piece, composed using the RCA Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center under a commission from Nonesuch Records, for which Wuorinen was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Music at the age of 32.

The 1970s were a particularly fruitful period for Wuorinen, who taught from 1971 to 1979 at the Manhattan School of Music ; his students included Arthur Russell.

In 1976 Wuorinen completed his Percussion Symphony a five movement work for 24 players including two pianos for the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble and his longtime colleague Raymond DesRoches, as well as his opera subtitled " a baroque burlesque ", The W. of Babylon with an original libretto by Renaud Charles Bruce.

His pupils included Jack Behrens, Herbert Brün, Morton Feldman, Matthew Greenbaum, M. William Karlins, Robert D. Levin, Boyd McDonald, Ralph Shapey, David Tudor, and Charles Wuorinen.

Fred Sherry, cello, Charles Wuorinen, piano, Thomas Kolor, percussion.

Wuorinen ’ s parents discouraged his pursuing a career in music.

Many early professional performances of Wuorinen ’ s compositions took place on the Music of Our Time series at the 92nd Street Y run by violinist Max Pollikoff.

In the late 70 ’ s Wuorinen became interested in the work of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation he conducted sonic experiments at Bell Labs in New Jersey.

For New York City Ballet Wuorinen also made a two-piano arrangement of the Schoenberg Orchestra Variations choreographed by Richard Tanner, and Peter Martins created a ballet based on Wuorinen ’ s A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky In 1985 Wuorinen was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

With the turn of the century one of the major champions of Wuorinen ’ s music became James Levine, music director of the Metropolitan Opera and later also of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Other champions of Wuorinen ’ s music include Peter Serkin, for whom Wuorinen composed three concerti including Time Regained ( based on music of Machaut, Matteo da Perugia, Guillaume Dufay, and Orlando Gibbons ) and Flying to Kahani, commissioned by Carnegie Hall ; the solo Scherzo and Adagio ; and the Second Piano Quintet with the Brentano Quartet, another ensemble with which Wuorinen has had a very fruitful relationship and for which he wrote his Fourth String Quartet.

In 2012 Wuorinen completed work on an opera begun in 2008 based on Annie Proulx ’ s Brokeback Mountain, with a libretto by Proulx.

MSO commissions include Glass ’ Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra and Wuorinen ’ s Symphony Seven.

* An opera, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Charles Wuorinen with libretto by James Fenton, written in 2001, was premiered at the New York City Opera in Fall 2004.

From an interview with Richard Burbank Wuorinen is quoted as saying, " What I did at Bell Labs ( with Mark Liberman ) was to try various experiments in which strings of pseudo-random material, usually pitches but sometimes other things, were generated and then subjected to traditional types of compositional organization, including twelve-tone procedures.

Minneosta Orchestra & Chorale, Edo de Waart, conductor, Charles Wuorinen, piano,

* Wuorinen ; John H. Finland and World War II, 1939-1944 ( 1948 ) online edition

Wuorinen was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City.

Wuorinen has lectured at universities throughout the United States and abroad, and has served on the faculties of Columbia, Princeton, and Yale Universities, the University of Iowa, University of California ( San Diego ), Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, State University of New York at Buffalo, and Rutgers University.

Robert Black cited Wuorinen as a particular influence on his own style of composition.

He has made numerous recordings, on such labels as RCA Victor, featuring music from Bach ( including four recordings of the Goldberg Variations-the first made when he was 18, the fourth when he was 47 ), Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and Dvořák as well as numerous more recent composers such as Reger, Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Takemitsu, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Stefan Wolpe and Charles Wuorinen.

He went on to study percussion with Raymond Des Roches and by the age of eighteen he had recorded the music of Edgar Varese and Charles Wuorinen for Nonsuch Records.

St. Luke ' Chamber Ensemble, Charles Wuorinen, conductor, David Taylor, bass trombone Richard Moredock, Cameron Grant, James Winn pianos.

* Charles Wuorinen: Adapting To The Times, James Romig, author.

The piano concerto form survived through the 20th century into the 21st, with examples being written by Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Medtner, Alexander Tcherepnin, Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, Michael Tippett, Charles Wuorinen, York Bowen, Frank Martin, Bohuslav Martinů, Peter Mieg, Heinrich Sutermeister, Dmitri Shostakovich, Samuel Barber, Witold Lutosławski, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Peter Mennin, György Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Selim Palmgren, Leroy Anderson, and others.

Wuorinen was composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony from 1984-1989.

* Charles Wuorinen: Art and Entertainment, Charled Wuorinen in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox.

* Interview with Charles Wuorinen by Bruce Duffie, February 26, 1987

The only thing that all Downtown music might be said to have in common is that, at least at the time of its original appearance, it was too bizarre – by dint of excessive length, stasis, simplicity, extemporaneity, consonance, noisiness, pop influence, vernacular reference, or other purported infraction – to have been considered " serious " modern music by proponents of " uptown " music performed from the 1960s through the 1980s at the Juilliard School, Columbia University, and Lincoln Center, under the direction of the composers Charles Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger in concerts by The Group for Contemporary Music, and concerts directed by the French conductor and pianist, Jacques-Louis Monod with the Guild of Composers.

Robert studied composition with Charles Wuorinen and Aaron Copland.

Serialism, more specifically named " integral " or " compound " serialism, was led by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe, and by Milton Babbitt, Donald Martino, and Charles Wuorinen in the United States.

From 1952 to 1956 Wuorinen was President of the Trinity School Glee Club.

Wuorinen was appointed to an instructorship at Columbia in 1964 and promoted to assistant professor in 1969 ; during this period, he held visiting lectureships or residencies at the New England Conservatory ( 1968-1971 ), Princeton University ( 1969-1971 ), the University of Iowa ( 1970 ), and the University of South Florida ( 1971 ).

In addition to the Dante texts Wuorinen was influenced by the watercolors illustrations of William Blake.

Aaron Jay Kernis is Jewish, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Manhattan School of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory, and Yale University ( under John Adams, Jacob Druckman, Morton Subotnick, and Charles Wuorinen ).,