Douglas Moore

When Douglas Moore was fifteen he composed the score for a show at his father’s clubhouse, and it was so successful that he wrote excitedly to his mother,” Now I can write any kind of music I want”
Instead of going to a conservatory then to study music he went back to the Hotchkiss School. There, [...]

Dmitri Kabalevsky

One of Russia’s leading composers, Dmitri Kabalevsky, has never left his own country. He was born in St. Petersburg when Tcherepnin was five years old and two years before the birth of Shostakovich.
Kabalevsky’s father was a civil servant. It was not until the boy was fourteen and the family had moved to Moskow, that he [...]

Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953)

“I bumped ma head against an iron trunk when I was three years old,” Sergei Prokofiev tell us in his autobiography, ” and the bump stayed for something like twenty-five years. A painter who did my portrait said, ‘Perhaps your whole talent is in this bump!’”
Wherever it was, it manifested itself early. He improvised a [...]

Alexander Tcherepnin

From his earliest days Alexander Tcherepnin heard beautiful operas in his home…for his father, Nicolai Tcherepnin, was one of the most famous Russian composers and conductors of his day. Young Alexander was destinated for a musical career and studied piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. While he was still a very young man, [...]