David Diamond

David Leo Diamond (Rochester, New York, 1915 - ) was an American composer of Austrian and Polish family descent, whose output encompasses symphonies, chamber music, choral works and songs, and who kept his distance from the serial and electronic currents of the second half of the twentieth century. He taught himself the violin as a child and, during his stay in Cleveland between 1927 and 1929, received training in violin and music theory from Ribaupierre at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

On returning to Rochester he attended the Eastman School of Music, where his teacher was Bernard Rogers, though he remained there for only one year. In 1933 he moved to New York, where he studied with Roger Sessions at the New Music School and became acquainted with the Dalcroze method under Paul Boepple. An Elfrida Whiteman scholarship enabled him in 1935 to continue with Sessions and to travel to Paris for the first time, where he received the support of Ravel, Milhaud, Roussel, Münch, Gide and Joyce. From 1937 he studied with Nadia Boulanger, with a first Guggenheim Fellowship funding his training until the outbreak of the Second World War.

On his return to the United States he found no teaching post, yet that decade of economic uncertainty produced some of his best-known works, among them the first four symphonies, composed between 1940 and 1945. He won a second Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de Rome and the Paderewski Prize, and between 1943 and 1945 he played the violin in a weekly radio programme broadcast from Carnegie Hall. In 1949 he was summoned to Hollywood to compose the score for a film, and that same summer he became the first American music lecturer at the Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg.

In 1951 he held a temporary Fulbright chair at the University of Rome and then settled in Florence, where he lived almost without interruption until 1965, partly to distance himself from the climate of repression associated with Senator McCarthy. Back in the United States, he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and served as Slee Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After a period as head of the composition department at the Manhattan School of Music, he taught composition at the Juilliard School from 1973 to 1986, and continued teaching there until 1997.

His music avoids serial, electronic and aleatoric procedures, and relies frequently on broad perfect chords and on tonal or modal idioms. Some pieces, especially those dedicated to Ravel and Satie, are deliberately in a French style. Although his chromaticism increases from 1951 onwards, dissonance does not necessarily grow. Diamond has stated that he never composed a twelve-tone piece, although sets of twelve pitches occasionally appear. His style, marked by contrapuntal rigour and clear classical form, has been described as that of a Romantic classicist of the twentieth century.