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HELPS, ROBERT BIOGRAPHY(1928 - 2001)
Robert Helps was Professor of Music at the University of
South Florida, Tampa, and the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music. He was a recipient of awards in
composition from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Guggenheim, Ford, and many other foundations, and
of a 1976 Academy Award from the Academy of Arts
and Letters. His orchestral piece Adagio for Orchestra,
which later became the middle movement of his
Symphony No. 1, won a Fromm Foundation award and
was premired by Leopold Stokowski and the Symphony
of the Air (formerly the NBC Symphony) at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His
Piano Concerto No. 1 was commissioned by the Thorne
Music Fund and first performed by the composer with the
Manhattan Conservatory orchestra. His Piano Concerto
No. 2 was commissioned through the Ford Foundation by
Richard Goode and performed by him with the Oakland
(CA) Symphony.
Robert Helps served as professor of
piano at the New England Conservatory, the San
Francisco Conservatory, Princeton University, Stanford
University, the University of California at Berkeley, and
the Manhattan School of Music. He was artist-in-residence
(pianist) at the University of California-Davis in
1973. He was recorded extensively as pianist, composer,
and pianist/composer on such labels as Victor, Columbia,
Composers Recordings Inc., Deutsche Grammophon,
New World, Desto, Son Nova, and GM Recordings.
Many of his compositions, including his Symphony No. 1
(Naumburg Award) and Gossamer Noons for voice and
orchestra, are recorded. He was very active as a solo and
chamber music pianist throughout the United States. His
major teachers were Abby Whiteside for piano, and
Roger Sessions for composition, and he toured
extensively with such internationally famous performers
as Bethany Beardslee, Isidore Cohen, Rudolf Kolisch,
Phyllis Curtin, soprano, and Aaron Copland, and for
many years performed solo and chamber works, many of
them world premires, for internationally known chamber
music and contemporary music organizations in New
York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston,
Minneapolis, and elsewhere. His later concerts included
memorial solo recitals of the music of renowned
American composer Roger Sessions at both Harvard and
Princeton Universities, an all-Ravel recital at Harvard,
and a solo recital in Town Hall, NY.
His final
compositions include Eventually the Carousel Begins, for
two pianos, A Mixture of Time for guitar and piano, which
had its premire in San Francisco in June 1990 by Adam
Holzman and the composer, The Altered Landscape
(1992) for organ solo and Shall We Dance (1994) for
piano solo, Piano Trio No. 2, and a piano quartet
commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation.
He died in 2001
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