Maura Bosch

{{Short description|American composer}}

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

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.{{cite web |url=http://www.sflc.org/concerts/programs/harp_program.pdf|title=A Holiday Festival for Chorus and Harp|accessdate=30 January 2011}}

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.{{cite book |title=The Voice of Chorus America: Volume 30|publisher=Chorus America|year=2006}}{{cite book |title=Sounding board: Volume 34, Issues 4-6|publisher=American Composers Forum|year=2007}}

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.{{cite book |title=UW Opera Props News February-March 2009}}

Works

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){{cite web |url=http://www.allianceartistmanagement.com/artist.php?id=cantus&aview=acclaim&nid=1093|title=Cantus|accessdate=30 January 2011}}
  • Art and Desire, opera (2009)

Bosch has published a text:

  • Everyone can compose music (2008) Princeton University

References