Jump to Content

Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
Ernst Krenek Manuscript and Letters to Will Ogdon
MSS 0700  
View entire collection guide What's This?
Search this collection
Collection Overview
 
Table of contents What's This?
Description
Two photographs, one typewritten manuscript of Krenek's book Music Here and Now, and four folders of letters from Krenek to Will Odgon, written between 1943 and 1985. The letters include references to music composition, occasional advice on career and personal matters, and happenings within Krenek and Odgon's musical circles.
Background
Ernst Krenek (1900-1991) was a Vienna-born composer of Czech ancestry. An active composer for more than seven decades, Krenek had a role in many of the century's significant musical movements, from atonality to neoclassicism and from jazz-influenced writing to total serialism. He enjoyed early popular success in Europe with his opera Jonny spielt auf ( Johnny Strikes Up, 1926), but under increasing pressure from the Nazi regime, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, where he developed credibility as a major modernist and instructor. Krenek taught music at various universities, including Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota from 1942-1947, and became an American citizen in 1945. His students included Will Ogdon (who followed him from the University of Wisconsin to Hamline, and in in 1955, completed the first important analytical study of Krenek's music as his doctoral thesis), George Perle and Robert Erickson. Krenek moved to California in 1947, where he continued to write and compose music. In 1965, when the department of music at UC San Diego was first being developed, Krenek made a recommendation for Ogdon or Erickson to be appointed as first chair. Ogdon was selected, and he quickly recruited Erickson; Krenek's influence over his former pupils can be seen in the department's early focus on composition as the foundation of music curriculum. Krenek authored several books, including Music Here and Now (1939), a study of Johannes Ockeghem (1953), and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music (1974).
Extent
0.25 Linear feet (1 archives box)
Restrictions
Publication rights are held by the creator of the collection.