Marjorie Ann Hess a.k.a. Maura Bosch (born 1956) is an American composer. She was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Hartt College of Music where she received a Bachelor of Music degree in 1978, and at Princeton University where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 2008, after studying with Alexander Lepak, Edward T. Cone, Milton Babbitt and Peter Westergaard.
Career edit
She married composer Jeffrey Brooks and lived for a while in Bath, England, where Brooks was composer-in-residence at Bath College. After returning to the United States, the couple settled in Minneapolis. She co-founded and ran Corn Palace Productions, a Minneapolis music theatre company, from 1990 through 1997. The company produced dozens of new works, including three of her own operas. One of them was based on a poem by James Merrill, with whom she collaborated in writing the libretto. She also founded and played with the ensemble Blackstone Bosch from 1997 until 2000.[1]
In 2007 Maura Bosch was in residence with the Tubman Family Alliance, a network of shelters for abused women, to compose a work based on their experiences.[2][3]
In 2009, Maura Bosch composed and wrote the libretto for her fourth opera, Art and Desire, about a fictional meeting between Lee Krasner and Clement Greenberg twenty years after the death of Krasner's husband, Jackson Pollock.[4]
Works edit
Bosch has composed works in a variety of genres including choral, vocal and instrumental works and opera. Selected compositions include:
- The Disappearance of Luisa Porto, opera (1989)
- Mirabell’s Book of Numbers, opera (1991)
- The Damnation of Felicity, opera (1994)
- 3 Hymns (1995)
- My Purity (1995)
- Zelda Songs (1997)
- Bronte Songs (1996)
- The Oxen (1993)
- Santuario (1992) for orchestra
- About the Night (1993) for string quartet
- The Turning, cantata (2007)[5]
- Art and Desire, opera (2009)
Bosch has published a text:
- Everyone can compose music (2008) Princeton University