Mid winter songs morten lauridsen biography

American composer

Morten Johannes Lauridsen III^[1] (born February 27, ) is an American composer and teacher.

Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten …

A National Medal of Arts recipient (),^[2] he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from to ,^[3] and is professor emeritus of composition at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he taught for fifty-two years until his retirement in ^[4]

Biography

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Lauridsen worked as a Forest Servicefirefighter and lookout on an isolated tower near Mount St.

Helens. He attended Whitman College for 2 years, before traveling south to study composition at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn, and Harold Owen.^[5] He began teaching at USC in ^[4]

In , Lauridsen was named an "American Choral Master" by the National Endowment for the Arts.

In , he received the National Medal of Arts from the president in a White