Edward Knight (born November 4, 1961) is an American composer. His work eschews easy classification, moving freely between jazz, theatrical and concert worlds.
Background
Knight was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was introduced to music by his grandmother, Kathryn Dyer Knight, a concert pianist who taught piano later in life. He excelled at trumpet; as a teenager, he toured three summers with Musical Youth International, performing in Russia, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and several European capitals.
Knight earned his undergraduate degree from Eastern Michigan University and his master's and doctorate in composition from University of Texas. He spent a year studying privately with John Corigliano in New York, and won a Rotary Scholarship for post-doctoral study at London's Royal College of Music, where he studied with John Lambert. At the Royal College, he became the first American to win the Arthur Bliss Memorial for outstanding postgraduate composer.
Early orchestral works
Knight came to national attention with four large-scale orchestral works in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Of Perpetual Solace, Total Eclipse, Granite Island, and Big Shoulders.
Of Perpetual Solace
Knight's doctoral work for University of Texas, premiered by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Orchestra Hall, Chicago, July 30, 1989. The 14-minute piece won first prize in the National Orchestra Association's New Music Orchestral Project.
Total Eclipse
The 11-minute piece was selected for the New York Philharmonic's Horizons '90: New Music for Orchestra concert, by a committee headed by Lawrence Leighton Smith and David Del Tredici.
Big Shoulders
The 1994 winner of ASCAP's Rudolf Nissim Prize for best new orchestral work, Big Shoulders was commissioned by ASCAP/Meet the Composer and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to commemorate the CSO's centennial. John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune called the 10-minute piece "visceral in its excitement" and noted: "Knight appears to know his way around the Windy City, for his score persuasively catches our town's jumpy, clashing cadences. Pathetic, mewling glissandi make an amusing leitmotif, and long strings of tremolos entwine boldly colored block sonorities. The score seizes and holds your imagination and makes you want to hear it again." The Kiev Philharmonic recorded Big Shoulders for volume seven of ERMMedia's “Masterworks of the New Era.”
Granite Island
The work was commissioned for the first L.A. Composers Project, a competition established to celebrate the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute's 10th season, and premiered in the Hollywood Bowl in August 1991. The piece was inspired by an abandoned lighthouse set atop a jagged granite island in Lake Superior. Critic Timothy Mangan of the Los Angeles Times noted: "Its originality stems form the composer's canny combination of steady meter with atonal lyricism, a waltz-like lilt with expressionist angst; as such, it sounds like Schoenberg's 'La Valse'. Its 12 minutes pass quickly and, on first hearing, seem tightly unified, suave and sinister, confidently orchestrated and worth another hearing."
Other New York premieres
During the same era, while living in London and New York, Knight also premiered “O Vos Omnes,” performed by I Cantori di New York in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall Feb. 11, 1989. The premiere of his Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Ensemble was given by the New York Chamber Ensemble in Florence Gould Hall with soloist Alan Kay. Reviewing the concert, Bernard Holland of The New York Times called Knight a "fresh, original voice" with "an inventive sense of humor." Knight worked as a visiting assistant professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, from 1992-94 before relocating with his family to Vermont.
First song cycle
A commission from the American Music Festival for a 15-minute work for soprano and orchestra inspired Knight to compose his first song cycle, “Life Is Fine.” Knight's setting of six Langston Hughes poems was premiered by the American Music Festival Orchestra. Wayne Lee Gay of Knight-Ridder News Service called the work “inventive and melodic…an eclectic, lyrical orchestral song cycle.” Gay wrote: “Life is Fine has the sound of a work that may well be a major addition to the American vocal-orchestral repertoire.”