ABSTRACT
Known mostly for his film and television music, Leonard Rosenman (1924–2008) was a prolific composer of serious music for the concert stage. But unlike some other film composers who thrived in the concert hall, Rosenman found that once he started to write for the screen, he was rarely able to get his concert music performed; when his concert music was performed, it was typically reviewed in the shadow of his film music, and this caused him to spiral into depression and to retract and even destroy some of his scores for concert works. Descriptions of Rosenman’s concert works led him to once say that his ‘art music’ indeed has ‘modernity, whatever that means’; Rosenman’s modernity included twelve-tone serialism, experiments with graphic notation and microtonality, and scoring for unconventional forces. Drawing on primary sources that include interviews with and lectures by the composer, and based on an examination of the manuscript scores housed at New York University, this chapter chronicles Rosenman’s career as a composer for the concert hall.
