Biography
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Born
3 March 1938
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Born In
Portland, Multnomah County, Oregon, United States
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Died
28 March 2015 (aged 77)
Douglas (Harry) Leedy, born March 3rd, 1938 in Portland, Oregon is an American composer. He studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College and at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was in a composition seminar with membership including La Monte Young and Terry Riley. An orchestral hornist, harpsichordist, and singer, he studied South Indian music in Madras with K.V. Narayaswami and was the musical director of the Portland Handel Festival. He taught music at UCLA and at Reed College. He foundeded the electronic music studio at UCLA, and his synthesized music was among the earliest commissioned album-length recordings of the Moog Synthesizer. The double album Entropical Paradise was both the first double album of synthesized music and featured modular analog syntheziser patches that, once set, played without further intervention by the performer. (Excerpts from Entropical Paradise were also included in the soundtrack album to the film Slaughterhouse Five as atmospheric compliments to the music by Bach that had been featured in the actual Glenn Gould-produced soundtrack). Although intially in an atonal, but not strictly serial, style, his music has included theatrical elements (Exhibition Music, Decay), has had deep relationships to early music (Symphoniae Sacrae for soprano, harpsichord, and viola da gamba), and he has explored the relationship, in classical Greek and Latin music betweent text and music. He is a scholar of tuning systems and has composed for keyboard instruments in historical meantone and non-equal temperaments and in various systems of Just intonation. His Pastorale (1987) is a setting of an Ode of Horace for chorus and retuned piano in Just Intonation, four hands.
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