Easley Blackwood, Jr.

Easley Blackwood, Jr. (born April 21, 1933, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died January 22, 2023) was an American composer whose music combined rhapsodic and romantic passion with chromatic materials and modified serial techniques. Besides composing for standard ensembles and instruments, he also composed for electronic instruments.

Blackwood—whose father, Easley Blackwood, Sr., was a noted contract bridge player—was a piano prodigy, playing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto in concerts with the Indianapolis Symphony when he was 14. He studied composition with Olivier Messiaen at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Massachusetts (1948–50); with Bernard Heiden at Indiana University (1949–51); with Paul Hindemith at Yale University (B.A., 1953; M.A., 1954); and with Nadia Boulanger in France (1954–56). He taught at the University of Chicago from 1958 to 1997, when he became professor emeritus.

Blackwood’s first symphony, which won a Koussevitzky Music Foundation prize, premiered in 1958 and attracted attention with its Gustav Mahler-like romantic swells, logical construction, and fluid tonality. His first string quartet received its premiere in the same year. Subsequent works included Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (1964), composed in tribute to Hindemith; piano, flute, and violin concertos; chamber works including two sonatas for violin and piano; and four more symphonies noted for increased mastery of rhythms and dissonant harmonies, while retaining their dramatic qualities. In 1972 he composed the multimedia opera Four Letter Scenes from Gulliver using equal tempered 12-, 15-, 16-, and 23-tone scales; a synthesizer was required to perform his score. He went on to experiment with 13- to 24-note scales and compose 12 Microtonal Études for synthesizer (1982).

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Blackwood’s later work featured several pieces for chamber and solo instrumental pieces, including Sonatina for Carillon (1992) and 2 Nocturnes (1996) as well as his Fifth Symphony (1990). He recorded piano sonatas of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland and wrote the treatise The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings (1986).