Louise Talma (1906-96)
Louise Talma was born in France. She was raised and educated in New York City. She received a Bachelor of Music degree from New York University, and a Masters of Arts degree from Columbia University. She also attended the Institute of Musical Arts (Juilliard School of Music). Perhaps her more rigorous training, however, was at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, where she studied piano with Isadore Philipp and, later, composition with Nadia Boulanger, who remained a close friend and colleague for many years.
In the early 1940s Talma visited the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Here, under the influence of the “Boston group” of composers: Lukas Foss, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Claudio Spies, Arthur Berger and Alexie Haieff, she composed most of her music.
Talma’s compositional output comprises more than forty major works, including orchestral pieces and a full-scale three-act opera. She has been awarded several awards and prices, among others a honorary doctorate, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Grant. Talma was the first woman to receive two Guggenheims, the first woman elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the first American woman to have a full-scale opera performed in Germany, the first American to teach at Fontainebleau, and the first woman to receive the Sibelius Medal for composition.
Talma died two months short of her ninetieth birthday, at Yaddo, the artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, New York. She had been composing the song cycle, "The Lengthening Shadows," which remains unfinished.
In her fascinating work „The Ambient Air“ she describes the music of environment like Creeping Fog and Shifting Winds – being inspired by the chant of a nightingale she once heard in Rome Accademy.