Ludwig Tuman
Lives in :, United States
As a composer, Ludwig Tuman has written for varied media, including orchestra, chorus, chamber, and solo. He studied composition under Darius Milhaud in Aspen, Leon Kirschner at Harvard, and Roger Nixon in San Francisco. He also studied the piano under the internationally recognized artists Adolf Baller and Istvan Nadas. His degrees in music composition are from Harvard (B.A. cum laude) and San Francisco State University (M.A.). He is a former faculty member of the Chicago Conservatory College, where he designed and taught courses in composition, theory, and non-Western music.
Ludwig Tuman is one of a growing number of contemporary composers whose perspective views the earth as a whole, and the diverse arts and cultures of the world as organically related to one another. The attraction such composers feel to musical cultures of various continents and historical periods has led them to selectively blend, in their compositions, musical elements from a variety of origins. The presence of such elements in Ludwig Tuman's works is sometimes overt, sometimes subtle. An example of the latter is "Awakening," a work for chamber orchestra, which can be viewed and heard as an mp3 file on this web site (link below in red, marked "Awakening").
While composed in an atonal idiom, "Awakening" contains hints of the classical music of Java, the raga of India, the baroque concerto grosso, and other sources that attentive listening will discover, blended together within a coherent artistic statement. "Awakening" is not program music in the sense of following a specific story line. However, as its title suggests, the music does evoke a movement from darkness into light, from dreams to consciousness. Listeners have described their experience of listening to it in terms of an individual awakening, nature’s revival after winter, creatures evolving over eons, and an entire world spinning into the morning.
Ludwig's works range widely in style, from renaissance choral pieces, to ragtime for four hands, to songs blending the classical Lieder with the harp and other folk instruments of South America.
His works have been presented in venues in the U.K., California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Venezuela, as well as in several television and radio broadcasts. As a pianist, he has given numerous recitals and has performed as a soloist with orchestras.
He is also a music producer and the former owner of a professional production facility, where he created and produced music for television. As a private teacher, he has worked with a wide range of students in composition, theory, film scoring and piano. Some of his students have gone on to produce their own albums. He is the author of a book, several published articles on the arts, and is an experienced choral director. |
