Wallingford Riegger

Wallingford Constantin Riegger (Albany, Georgia, 1885 – New York, 1961) was one of the American composers who took avant-garde music most seriously in the first half of the twentieth century. Although he was born in Georgia, he grew up in Indianapolis and New York, and his training as a cellist and composer led him, as early as 1907, to the first class of the Institute of Musical Art.

After completing his studies in Berlin, where he studied composition with Edgar Stillman-Kelley and conducted for the first time in 1910, he spent several years as principal cellist of the St. Paul orchestra. In 1914 he returned to Germany to serve as assistant conductor in Würzburg and, the following year, in Königsberg. The entry of the United States into the First World War forced him to return home, where he failed to establish himself as a conductor and had to support his family through a series of teaching posts. It was during these years that he began to compose seriously, and some of his early works received prizes, such as the Paderewski Prize of 1922 and the Coolidge Prize of 1924.

The turning point came in 1928, when he settled in New York again and came into contact with Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse and Carlos Salzedo. Over the following decade he became one of the most lucid champions of modernism, involved with new-music associations. Stokowski premiered his Study in Sonority in Philadelphia, a work that had provoked mockery at its first hearings, and his music was also heard in Berlin.

American modern dance was another of his fields. He wrote scores for Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Hanya Holm, among them New Dance and With my Red Fires, and from the former he drew arrangements that became his most popular pieces. From 1938 he returned to absolute music with string quartets, symphonies, quintets and a concerto for piano and wind quintet. His Symphony No. 3, commissioned by Columbia University, earned him the New York Critics' Circle award in 1948 and brought him greater fame than any earlier work. In Europe, the conductor Hermann Scherchen was one of his principal champions.

His language, atonal and dodecaphonic in character, rested on vigorous rhythm and a thoroughly assimilated counterpoint, with canons, fugues and passacaglias. He composed slowly and revised his scores extensively, and in his last years a more playful tone emerges. His legacy lies in having brought dodecaphony to American music when few were practising it, and in maintaining a radical stance even when the avant-garde had changed direction.