Composer Wayne Peterson (from the SFSU memorial announcement on Twitter)
Composer Wayne Peterson died at the beginning of this month on April 7 at the age of 93. He joined the faculty of San Francisco State University (SFSU) in 1960, retiring at the rank of Professor of Music in 1991. For the next three years he served as guest professor of composition at Stanford University.
Sadly, much of the obituary content I encountered centered on a controversy. Peterson was awarded the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Music for “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark,” commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, which performed the premiere performance under the baton of David Zinman. In awarding Peterson the Prize, the Pulitzer board overturned the unanimous selections of its jury for a composition by Ralph Shapey, “Concerto Fantastique.” In 2012 Peterson observed that, while he was very satisfied with Zinman’s performance, the music had never been given another performance, meaning that the award “meant nothing for the piece that won.”
A far more positive aspect of Peterson’s life involved his long-time relationship with Earplay and its commitment to a repertoire of new chamber music. Over the course of that relationship, Earplay performed more than a dozen of Peterson’s compositions. Tonight, Earplay will present archival footage of one of those performances. This will be a video recording of “Brief Encounters,” a violin solo played by Terrie Baune at an Earplay concert given at the ODC Theatre on May 18, 2015.
This video will be live-streamed on a YouTube Web page at 7 p.m. tonight, Monday, April 26.
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