Who is Gloria

The Munich-based American composer Gloria Coates is best known as a symphonist, though she has also composed nine string quartets as well as vocal and chamber music. Her String Quartet No. 9 opens with unworldly sonorities, glissandos, micro-tonalities and other unusual colours which develop by means of a mirror canon. In contrast, the Sonata for Violin Solo sets immense technical demands, particularly in its use of multiple stops beneath the lyrical fragments. Taking its subtitles from phrases within Emily Dickinson poems, her Lyric Suite for Piano Trio is a captivating mix of melodic gestures and spectral harmonies.

In 1978, a sensation at the Warsaw Autumn Festival was caused by a woman composer’s sonically groundbreaking opus, which bore the soberly descriptive title "Music on Open Strings": music on empty, i. e. non-fingered, strings. At that time, being a woman made an eminent difference in one’s artistic career.