Gloria Coates
  (c) Hilde Zemann, 1982
spinet pieces Entering the Unknown (with Birgit Ramsauer), World Premier 2004
Abraham Lincolnīs Cooper Union Address, World Premier 2004
statement "Entering the Unknown" is a total art piece consisting of a film from Birgit Ramsauer, and spinet music and music from a string quartet composed by Gloria Coates. It is a work expressing the frustrations of our time; seeing and being among crowds of people in a heavily populated world where there is no real communication or feelings for others. The people move as if on a treadmill, appearing like empty figures without faces and evoking feelings of anxiety and loneliness. 

"Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Address": On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln stood on the platform of the Great Hall of Cooper Union and delivered a brilliant speech which not only gave him the nomination but 9 months later the Presidency of the United States. He proved that the founding
fathers and our Constitution opposed slavery and the expansion of slavery into the territories. I have distilled Lincoln's text to a fragment of ist length and created a narrative, graphic poem. The spinet is used percussively and the string orchestra is that of the first movement of "Symphony No. 1" com-posed in 1973, The projection behind Lincoln is from a naive collage on wood (1976) by Dorothy Cole entitled "Abraham Lincoln". The composer - musicologist Kyle Gann interprets Abraham Lincoln.This performance will be slides of paintings by Robert Gwathmey, one of the first painters to paint the African Americans with dignity and my drawing teacher while I was a student at Cooper Union.
link http://home.wanadoo.nl/eli.ichie/coates.html
country Germany, USA
bio Gloria Coates, born in Wausau, Wisconsin, based since 1969 in Munich has divided her time between the USA and Europe. She began composing at an early age, winnng a National Composition contest when she was 14. Her main professors were Otto Luening and Alexander Tcherepnin. After her Masters Degree in Composition she did post graduate work at Columbia University. She is the recipient of numerous commissions, prizes, and honors. She also attended Cooper Union Art School. She continued painting throughout the years; her paintings are seen on numerous CD covers of her music. Her experiments with vocal multiphonics were demonstrated in Darmstadt in 1972, but her main contribution was her own particular use of microtones which she began in 1962. She eventually developed her method to apply to orchestral works of which she has 14 symphonies. Although her music has been performed at leading festivals; Warsaw Autumn 1978, Berlin Festival 1981, 2004, New Music America 1989, Dresden Festival, and others; and by orchestras; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Stuttgart Philharmonic, St.Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Kronos, Henschel, and Kreuzer Quartets to name a few, her music burst into international recognition since the 1990's through the CDs of CPO (orchestral music), Naxos (8 String Quartets,) and New World Records (vocal - symphonic music).