From his birth in 1906 to the mid-1950s, Normand Lockwood followed the path of success as a composer in the U.S. Between 1925 and 1945 he studied with Nadia Boulanger, received the Rome prize and two Guggenheim fellowships, took prestigious academic positions, and established a flourishing career in New York, with considerable national success. His move to San Antonio in 1953 ended his national career, but he has continued to create works with high musical and aesthetic integrity, committed to creating good music regardless of popular recognition. Lockwood taught composition at Oberlin, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia, Westminster Choir College, Trinity University, Oregon, Hawaii, and Denver, from which he retired in 1974. To date, he has composed nearly 450 pieces in all traditional musical genres, including choral works, keyboard works, chamber music, solo songs, works for large instrumental ensembles, operas, and incidental music for drama. In this extensive biography, author Kay Norton discusses Lockwood’’s consistent success as a composer in the academic world, his progressive incorporation of the many musical languages that have influenced American composers in this century, his special insight into the relationship between music, performer, and medium, and the disparity between his abundant compositional gifts and his relative obscurity today. Six chapters cover the musical genres of his output and analyze several exceptional works in detail, with musical examples. The book closes with a comprehensive catalog of Lockwood’’s music, organized by genre and annotated with premiere and dedication information, standard information of forces, duration, availability, and bibliography.
