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PAN PIPES • SUMMER 2016 • sai-national.org 6 O P U Y Z Ursula Mamlok, SAI Honorary Member and renowned composer, died May 4 in Berlin. She was 93. Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923 and began her musical training very early. To escape Nazi persecution, her family moved to Ecuador to live with relatives in 1939. At the age of seventeen, she traveled alone to the Mannes School of Music in New York on a scholarship. In the summer of 1944, she spent a few months at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina, known for its close ties with the Bauhaus, the German art and design school founded by German architect Walter Gropius, and for its many renowned lecturers and masterclasses. There she encountered the musical theories of Arnold Schönberg. In 1947 she married Dwight (Dieter) Mamlok, a Hamburg native who fled with the Kindertransport, a rescue mission to save German Jewish children. Mamlok studied composition under Roger Sessions, Jerzy Fitelberg, Stefan Wolpe, and finally under the latter's pupil Ralph Shapey, who had a lasting influence on her artistic development and the radical change in her compositional style. At the age of thirty-two, she pursued another degree at the Manhattan School of Music, in order to gain a Bachelor's and Master's in Music. She won an academic lectureship and taught theory and composition at New York University, Columbia University, Temple University and, for over forty years, at the Manhattan School of Music. She received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her works are regularly performed by major domestic foreign ensembles and have been recorded by the CRI, Gasparo, Leonarda, Newport Classic, Music and Arts, Opus One, True Media, and Centaur labels, and are published by C.F. Peters Corporation, American Composers Edition, McGuinness and Marx, and Hildegard. In 1987, Mamlok received a Commendation of Excellence "for her contribution to the world of concert music" by BMI. She was also a board member of the League of Composers/ International Society for Contemporary Music. She served as an SAI Philanthropies Inter- American Music Award composer-judge in 1978 along with Jean Eichelberger at the 75 th anniversary National Convention of SAI. She was admitted to the SAI Composers Bureau in 1997. In 2006, following the death of her husband, Mamlok returned to Berlin, taking with her the Baldwin grand piano she had bought in New York. Thanks to the efforts of musicologist Bettina Brand, well- known ensembles such as the Klenke Quartett, musikFabrik, and the Ensemble SurPlus, and established musicians such as Kolja Lessing, Holger Groschopp, and Jakob Spahn, an enthusiasm for her music developed, with the result that she soon became an important figure in contemporary music circles in Germany. In 2013, for her 90th birthday, her works were performed at the Philharmonie, Berlin's main concert hall, and in November of the same year she received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany First Class. In 2012, Böhlau-Verlag published her biography, Time in Flux – Die Komponistin Ursula Mamlok by Habakuk Traber. GRACE NOTE Prolific Composer Remembered Ursula Mamlok with Becky Starobin, President of Bridge Records.

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