Gloria Coates

Gloria Coates, born in the U.S., was active for most of her career in Germany. She was a prolific composer who did much to promote American music in her adopted country, and she sometimes returned to the U.S. in later life as a lecturer. Coates was born Gloria Kannenberg in Wausau, Wisconsin, on October 10, 1933. Her mother was a singer, and her father was a politician. Coates was musical from the start and sang on the radio as a child, but also got interested in composition early; she won a National Federation of Music Clubs composition contest while in her early teens. Coates attended Cooper Union in New York as an undergraduate, studying music. A major influence was composer Alexander Tcherepnin, whom she met in 1952; she took lessons from him and later attended his summer courses at the Salzburg Mozarteum. She married attorney Francis Coates in 1959. Coates went on for a master's degree at the University of Louisiana in Baton Rouge. For a time, Coates worked as a singer, actor, director, writer, and artist in New York and Chicago, taking some post-graduate courses at Columbia University from Otto Luening and Jack Beeson. In 1969, she and her small daughter traveled to Munich so that she could take voice lessons there. The plan didn't work out; Coates suffered serious injuries in a skiing accident and, from 1971, devoted the rest of her life to composition, but she fell in love with Germany and spent much of the rest of her life there. Coates established a German-American contemporary music series in Munich in 1973 and ran it until 1981. These events introduced a good deal of American music to West Germany, where it had previously been rare. She also found performance opportunities outside that series; her work Music for Open Strings (also known as her Symphony No. 1) was played at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1978, becoming one of the very contemporary American works played in the former East Bloc of Communist countries. Coates was a finalist in the Koussevitsky Competition for composers in 1986. She was quite prolific, writing 16 symphonies, 11 string quartets, other orchestral works, and several song cycles. By the mid-2020s, some 45 of Coates' works had been recorded, including many of the symphonies and string quartets. Coates returned part-time to the U.S. in the 1990s, giving lectures at Harvard University, Brown University, Boston University, and the University of Wisconsin. She died in Munich on August 19, 2023.
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