In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States

25. Emma Lou Diemer

25 emma Lou diemer The prolific composer Emma Lou Diemer has been writing music for over seventy years, and she still exclaims, “I think I’m the happiest when I’m writing!” Born in 1927 and growing up in and around Kansas City, Missouri, Diemer was exposed to big-band music, the American Songbook, 1930s radio broadcasts of orchestral music, and music from the Christian church. She and her siblings were encouraged as children to pursue their artistic natures, and Diemer began composing music at age thirteen. She gravitated to the organ she heard in church as a large machine capable of innumerable shades of color and power. Like Mary Jane Leach, Diemer concerns herself with the acoustics of space and enjoys play- emmA LOU dIemer · 437 ing different organs in varied halls. During our conversation, she discusses her early passion for the organ and her disappointment that it is not a more popular instrument today. With her early interest in this adaptable machine, it is no surprise that, like Laura Karpman, Svjetlana Bukvich, and Pamela Z, Diemer also gravitated toward technology when it was introduced to her as an adult. An early advocate of electronic possibilities in music, she began composing with electronics in her own music in the mid-1970s, pioneered the introduction of MIDI to the church organ, and founded the electronic and computer music center at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1973. One of the few women composers in the mid-twentieth century to earn advanced degrees in music at Yale and Eastman, Diemer studied with Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and Roger Sessions. She furthered her studies in Brussels on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1952–53 to study piano with André Dumortier and composition with Jean Absil at the Royal Conservatory . The composer in residence with the Santa Barbara Symphony from 1990 to 1992, Diemer has been honored with the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award in Orchestral Music for her 1991 piano concerto and named Composer of the Year by the American Guild of Organists in 1995. Still a prolific composer, Diemer has over five hundred compositions in her catalog for organ, orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, band, voice, keyboard, solo instruments, and electro-acoustic repertoire. Celebrated for her organ music , she has also composed abundant works for choir, including her large settings Mass and Songs of the Earth. Having spent most of the twentieth century fusing traditional music with new developments and ideas, Diemer remains surprised that the simple and relatively easily written Three Madrigals became the choral piece for which she is most known. While the nuances of Diemer’s style have adapted with the times, she has stayed true to her core of tonality, explaining, “I came much earlier than some of the younger composers. There were different opportunities and different styles, and I’ve always leaned more towards a conservative style in some ways.” Like Leach, she expresses how one’s music “must make sense within its own being.” Still rare for women composers even today, over one hundred of Diemer’s compositions have been recorded. She believes that the challenge of being a working musician informs her writing and encourages her to compose for both amateur and professional musicians. A natural teacher, Diemer has always combined composition and performance with teaching, and she was a professor of theory and composition at UCSB for twenty years. In fact, when I expressed my own trepidation at composing a melody that someone else may have already written, she became my teacher for the moment , encouraging me to continue and explaining technique to help me improve. 438 . chapter 25 During our conversation, Diemer discusses her musical development, the important composer-performer relationship, her views on audience, and a life in music. After sweetly describing her earlier days, when she would place her working score under her pillow at night to guard it, she reflects upon her career: “My life has been very one-track. And if your whole eighty years or a hundred years has been one-track, you hope there’s something that you can say, ‘Well, it’s done some good in the world.’ And I think it has.” *** April 2010, at her home in Santa Barbara, California EMMA LOU DIEMER: I was kind of a restless child who liked to play by ear, so my teacher would teach me things by ear. She would play, and then I...