Lukas Foss

Born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin in 1922 and died in New York in 2009, the composer had to move with his family after 1933, first to France and then to the USA. His composition teachers included Randall Thompson at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and Paul Hindemith at Yale University; he studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and Serge Koussevitzky, among others. One of his fellow students in Philadelphia was Leonard Bernstein, with whom he had a lifelong working relationship and friendship. Foss' first compositions were in the neoclassical idiom, but after his appointment as professor of composition at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1951 (as Arnold Schoenberg's successor), he explored the means of improvisation and aleatoric music. In 1962, he was appointed chief conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra - a post he held until 1970. In 1963, Foss founded the Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he appointed Julius Eastman, among others, as a fellow. In 1970, Foss took over the direction of the Brooklyn Philharmonia (later Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra), which he directed until 1991. From 1972 to 1976, he also took on the position of chief conductor of the Kol Yisrael Orchestra (now the Jerusalem Philharmonic), and from 1981 to 1986 that of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.