American Howard Quilling (1935 - 2016) has died

[Scion7]

I had never heard of him, either.  He's not listed in The Grove.  Quite a bit of his stuff is up on YouTube.
Anyway - Navona Records has this to say:

Howard Quilling (b. 1935) was born in Enid, Oklahoma and grew up in Napa CA. He received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music from the University of Southern California and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He studied music composition with Ingolf Dahl, Robert Linn, David Raksin, Ernst Kanitz, Emma Lou Diemer, Edward Applebaum, and Peter Racine Fricker.

In 1971 Quilling accepted a position at Bakersfield College to each music theory and composition. In 1981 he was appointed Composer in Residence. Quilling retired from Bakersfield College in 1996, although he still taught part time until 2002.

In 1988 he established the New Directions Concert Series under the auspices of the Bakersfield Symphony. The Bakersfield Symphony has premiered two of his overtures: Mountain Streams in 1996 and From Quiet Beginnings , commissioned by the Symphony for the Centennial Celebration of the City of Bakersfield in 1998. In 2000 From Quiet Beginnings was recorded by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra for the MMC label. He has received a number of other commissions and awards and has works published by, Fred Bock Music Company, North/South Editions, Small Rose Printing, and Howard Quilling Editions. Recordings of his music are on the Vienna Modern Masters label and on the North/South label.

Max Lifchitz, director of North/South Consonance, has premiered five of Howard's compositions and has given over 20 performances of his works. For the tenth anniversary of North/South Consonance Max Lifchitz commissioned Howard's Concerto for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra. The resulting concerto also received a Meet the Composer Award for the premiere on June 5, 1990. In 2003 Quilling's String Trio was awarded the William Lincer Foundation Award. In the past four years (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) he has had works performed by the Avenue Winds in the San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival.

Quilling has written over 200 compositions, encluded in his output are works for orchestra, symphonic band, various chamber ensembles, chorus, solo vocal, and solo compositions for various instruments. His works have been performed in many locales. Quilling is a member of NACUSA, SCI, American Composers Forum, AGO, and BMI.

[Scion7]

Some listed compositions:

Diversion, for orchestra

From Quiet Beginnings, for orchestra

Piano Trio

Remembrance, for chamber orchestra

Sonata for clarinet & piano

Sonata for piano No 2

Sonata for piano No 3

Sonata for piano No 4

Sonata for violin & piano No. 1 "The Dahl"

Sonata for violin & piano No. 2 "Shapiro"

Suite for alto saxophone & wind orchestra

[Scion7]

[Scion7]

obit:

Howard Quilling, a prolific classical composer with an international reputation who cared nearly as much about promoting the careers of emerging talents as he did about advancing his own, died unexpectedly early Friday. He was 80.

"I think he was a successful composer," said his wife, Joyce Quilling, in an interview Friday. "He definitely was a successful human being. A lot of his students felt he inspired and helped them a great deal."

Quilling taught music composition and theory at Bakersfield College for 25 years, retiring in 1996. Despite his long career in education, he managed to compose some 250 pieces of music in his lifetime, his wife estimated.

"I think he was pretty well pleased with his output," she said, nothing that Quilling wrote his first piece while in high school in Napa, where he grew up.

Among the composer's commissions was the highly regarded "From Quiet Beginnings," written to commemorate Bakersfield's centennial in 1998. His compositions have been recorded and performed all over the world — in the Czech Republic, Poland and in major cities throughout the country, including Los Angeles and New York. A high point of his career, his wife said, was a performance of a piano sonata at one of the world's most prestigious venues: Carnegie Hall in Manhattan.

"He was very highly respected throughout the country," said fellow composer and educator Doug Davis. "Probably more composers around the country knew of Howard Quilling and Bakersfield because of his efforts. And he had performances at national conferences of composers and long relationships with other groups that were similar and supported new music. They were quite aware of what he was doing here in Bakersfield."

What he was doing, with help from his wife and Davis, was providing exposure to up-and-coming composers with a concert series he began in 1988.

"It's hard for contemporary composers to get their music performed," Mrs. Quilling said.

Called New Directions, the concert series was a collaboration with the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra, which provided a chamber group of about seven musicians to perform the selected composers' works. As many as two concerts a year typically were scheduled, a punishing pace that forced Quilling's decision to end the series in 2009.

"I have thought about (resuming) New Directions," Davis said. "I'm trying to find out how. I think it will happen, that the symphony and our local musicians will come together to organize something similar to what was organized by Howard Quilling. Because without it, we are diminished."

Born in Enid, Okla., Quilling moved to the West Coast as a boy with his family. His first instrument was the clarinet but because of his proficiency, he was asked to fill a vacancy in the oboe section.

"He sang, was a pianist, played oboe and other woodwinds," his wife said. "The organ was his favorite instrument."

He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California, where he met his future wife, a pianist who, though she didn't know it at the time, had a long career ahead of her as a music teacher in the Panama-Buena Vista School District.

Quilling was armed with several advanced degrees when he accepted a teaching job in Bakersfield. While teaching and raising two boys — Gary, also a musician, and David — Quilling always managed to find time to write.

"He would sit down at the piano and an idea would be in his head and he would play around with it and get the idea worked out so that it fit what he wanted to do with it. When he started, he wasn't always sure what it was going end up in," Mrs. Quilling said. "He usually wrote out a piano version if it was going to be for an orchestral setting and he'd have me play it because piano was my instrument and we would talk about it."

Davis said his friend's work tended toward the traditional and reflected "a rich complexity of thought."

"We all write differently," he said. "For myself, I don't know if the piece is going to take five hours or 1,000. When you think about it, sometimes that's a painful process. I might be exaggerating those numbers, but I'm afraid I'm pretty close."

The last completed Quilling composition was a piece he did for a gathering of the American Guild of Organists in Bakersfield three years ago.

"When he wrote the piece for the convention, he told me at that time, 'That's my last piece.' And he was right," his wife said. "It was."

But in some ways, that's fitting, she said. The church was a major focus of his life. In fact, he was at choir practice just hours before his death, said long-time friend and fellow organist Sue Wagner.

"He was his normal self last night, doing his usual thing of criticizing what a composer had done on this one anthem we were singing," she said. "He was a good tenor. A choir becomes a little family. I can't imagine life without him."

Wagner was already looking ahead with dread to a task she was counting on Quilling to help her perform for Trinity Anglican, the church formed when members of St. Paul's Episcopal broke away to start their own congregation in recent years. The congregation is meeting at St. John's in southwest Bakersfield for now, until construction of the new church is complete. Someday, Wagner hopes, a pipe organ will be at the center of worship services at Trinity.

"I was counting on Howard to be on the organ committee again," she said. "I feel all out there by myself now."

Quilling suffered from diabetes and sleep apnea, though his wife did not know the cause of death Friday.

"I wonder how I'm going to get along without him," said Mrs. Quilling of her husband of nearly 60 years. "He lived a long time, but that time comes."

In addition to his wife and sons, Quilling is survived by four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

[EddieRUKiddingVarese]

Always sad to hear when a composer passes