Discipline: Music Composition

Jacob Avshalomov

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Portland, OR
MacDowell Fellowships: 1952, 1976
Jacob Avshalomov (1919 - 2013) was an American composer and conductor born in Tsingtao, China. Avshalomov assisted his father Aaron Avshalomoff in Shanghai with a ballet production and score work. He then enlisted in the British Volunteer Corps following Japan’s invasion of China, and eventually returned to the U.S. He then attended Reed College, where he studied with Gershkovitch and participated in the Portland Junior Symphony. From there he went to the Eastman School of Music and studied composition and orchestration with Bernard Rogers. During WWII he lived in London, where he conducted a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion. Following the war he received the Ditson Fellowship and joined the faculty of the music department at Columbia University where he taught from 1946 to 1954. While at Columbia he conducted premier performances of Bruckner’s Mass No.1, Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards he received include a Bloch Award, a Naumburg Recording Award, a Ditson Conductor Award, the Governor’s Arts Award and The American Symphony Orchestra League Award. Avashalomov also served on the Music Planning Section of the National Arts Endowment from 1977-79, and was recognized by the Portland Center for the Performing Arts Foundation for outstanding contributions to Portland’s art community.

Studios

Irving Fine

Jacob Avshalomov worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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