Morton Gould

Morton Gould (December 10, 1913 – February 21, 1996) was an American composer, conductor, arranger, and pianist born in Richmond Hill, New York, of Austrian-Jewish heritage. Recognized as a child prodigy, he published his first composition at age six. He studied at the Institute of Musical Art in New York, where his principal teachers were Abby Whiteside and Vincent Jones, and he was a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia.

During the Depression, Gould worked as a teenager playing piano in New York City movie theaters and with vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened in December 1932, the nineteen-year-old was taken on as its staff pianist. By 1935 he had moved into conducting and arranging orchestral programs for WOR radio in New York, broadcasting nationally through the Mutual Broadcasting System and combining popular and classical programming for a wide audience. He led the orchestra for The Jack Pearl Show on NBC in the 1930s, and in the 1940s appeared on several radio programs including the Cresta Blanca Carnival, Keep 'Em Rolling, Major Bowes' Shower of Stars, and The Chrysler Hour on CBS. In 1942 he composed the score for the short film Ring of Steel, directed by Garson Kanin and produced by the U.S. Office for Emergency Management. The following year, the William H. Weintraub advertising agency hired him as its musical director, a position believed to be the first of its kind in the advertising industry.

Gould's Broadway work spanned several decades and genres. He composed and orchestrated the 1945 musical Billion Dollar Baby and the 1950 musical Arms and the Girl. His ballet score Interplay, created for choreographer Jerome Robbins, also dates from 1945, as does his work on Concert Varieties. The revue Jerome Robbins' Broadway in 1989 featured him as a songwriter for material drawn from Billion Dollar Baby, and his credits also include Pillar of Fire. Beyond the stage, Gould composed film scores for Delightfully Dangerous, Cinerama Holiday, and Windjammer, and wrote music for the CBS television series World War One and the miniseries Holocaust, as well as ballet scores including Fall River Legend and I'm Old Fashioned.

As a conductor, Gould led all of the major American orchestras as well as ensembles in Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Recording extensively under his own name, usually credited to Morton Gould and his Orchestra, he released dozens of albums across multiple genres on labels including Columbia and RCA Victor. He won a Grammy Award in 1966 for his recording of Charles Ives' first symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and in 2005 he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1983 he received the American Symphony Orchestra League's Gold Baton Award, and in 1986 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Gould's music was commissioned by symphony orchestras across the United States and by institutions including the Library of Congress, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Ballet Theatre, and the New York City Ballet. He received three commissions for the United States Bicentennial. In 1993 his work Ghost Waltzes was commissioned for the ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and that same year he received the El Premio Billboard for his contributions to Latin music in the United States. In 1994 he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime contributions to American culture. In 1995 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Stringmusic, a work commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra to mark the final season of director Mstislav Rostropovich.

Gould was a longtime member of ASCAP, joining its board in 1959 and serving as its president from 1986 to 1994. During his presidency he advocated for the intellectual property rights of performing artists as the internet began to affect the organization's membership. He also served on the board of the American Symphony Orchestra League and on the National Endowment for the Arts music panel. His refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, even when offered recording contracts and Broadway productions in exchange for his cooperation, resulted in his placement on the Committee's blacklist.

Gould married Shirley Uzin in 1936; that marriage ended in divorce in 1943. He subsequently married Shirley Bank, with whom he had four children: Eric, born February 16, 1945; David, born March 2, 1947; Abby, born February 3, 1950; and Deborah, born December 21, 1954. His original manuscripts and personal papers are archived at the Library of Congress. Gould died on February 21, 1996, in Orlando, Florida, at the age of 82, while serving as the first resident guest composer and conductor at the Disney Institute during a three-day tribute to his music.