Douglas Moore
Douglas Stuart Moore was an American composer, songwriter, organist, pianist, conductor, educator, actor, and author. A composer who mainly wrote works with an American subject, his music is generally characterized by lyricism in a popular or conservative style which generally eschewed the more experimental progressive trends of musical modernism. Composer Virgil Thomson described Moore as a neoromantic composer who was influenced by American folk music. While several of his works enjoyed popularity during his lifetime, only his folk opera The Ballad of Baby Doe has remained well known into the 21st century.
Moore first created music while a student at Yale University from 1911 through 1917. He served as an officer in the United States Navy during World War I before pursuing graduate studies in music composition with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum de Paris and with Ernest Bloch at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Moore began his professional life as the organist and music director for the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1921 through 1925, during which time he also worked professionally as a leading actor with the Cleveland Play House. His first composition of note, Four Museum Pieces, was originally written for organ in 1922. The piece won him a competitive Joseph Pulitzer National Traveling Scholarship which funded further composition studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1926.
In the fall of 1926 Moore joined the music faculty of Barnard College at Columbia University. He was rapidly promoted at Columbia from adjunct faculty to professor and head of the music department at Barnard College in 1927, thanks in large part to the success of his orchestral suite The Pageant of P.T. Barnum. Moore was director of the Columbia University orchestra from 1926 through 1935. In 1940 he succeeded Daniel Gregory Mason as chair of the music program at Columbia, a post he held until his retirement in 1962. His roles at Columbia and the MacDowell Colony as well as leadership roles on the governing boards of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and the American Academy of Arts and Letters made Moore one of the more influential music educators of the mid 20th century.
Moore composed music for the theater, film, ballet and orchestra. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his folk operas, beginning with the children's opera The Headless Horseman. His next folk opera to achieve success was The Devil and Daniel Webster which premiered on Broadway in 1939 and was based on the 1936 short story of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét. Moore was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the opera Giants in the Earth in 1951. His best known work, The Ballad of Baby Doe, premiered at the Central City Opera in 1956 and received a critically lauded production at the New York City Opera in 1958. The NYCO recorded the opera with Beverly Sills in the title role. It has remained a part of the standard opera repertory. As an author he penned two books on music, Listening to Music and From Madrigal to Modern Music.
Life
Early life (1893–1911)
Douglas Stuart Moore was born on August 10, 1893, in Cutchogue, New York, in the farmhouse of his grandfather, Joseph Hull Moore, where both his father and brothers were also born. He was the youngest child of Stuart Hull Moore and Myra Drake, both of whom descended from the first colonial English settlers to America. He had two older brothers, Arthur and Eliot, and an older sister, Dorothy. His father built another nearby home for his family on the Moore family's farm, named Quawksnest, in which Moore and his family spent their summers. As an adult Moore lived on the family's Cutchogue property until his death in 1969. He resided in a cottage named Salt Meadow which was originally a garage and clubhouse before being converted into a home for Moore in 1933.Moore's father made a living as a publisher of among other things the literary magazine Ladies' World, a business which he sold to S. S. McClure upon his retirement in 1913. While not in Cutchogue, the Moore family resided in Brooklyn, New York, at a house located at 43 McDonough Street until 1914 when the family moved into a Brooklyn apartment building at the corner of Van Buren Street and Sumner Avenue. The family also owned a summer home in Pasadena, California which was purchased after Stuart Moore sold his business. While there were no professional musicians in Moore's family, his mother was an amateur pianist who also sang in the women's chorus of Brooklyn's Chaminade Society. At his mother's insistence, Moore began his music education at the age of seven with the conductor of the CS chorus, Emma Richardson Kuster, who began giving him piano lessons in 1900. He later was a piano student of Beverly Day. His father enjoyed playing pianola rolls in the family home during his youth.
Moore attended elementary school at the Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn which was operated at that time by Charles Herbert Levermore. At the age of 13 he matriculated to the Fessenden School, a boys boarding school in West Newton, Massachusetts which he attended for the 1906–1907 academic year. After this, he completed the last four years of his college preparatory education at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut from which he graduated in the spring of 1911. At Hotchkiss he made close friendships with several fellow students that would last through adulthood. These included friendships with Archibald MacLeish, who became a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, writer, and the ninth Librarian of Congress; Donald Oenslager, who became a Tony Award winning scenic designer; Henry Luce, who founded the magazines Time, Life, and Fortune; and Emily Bailey, whom Moore eventually married in 1920.
Yale University (1911–1917)
Moore entered Yale University as a college freshman in the fall of 1911 alongside his Hotchkiss friend Archibald MacLeish. At Yale he composed songs for school events which demonstrated a talent for writing music within a popular style. He quickly gained a reputation at Yale for writing humorous songs, one of which, "Naomi: The Restaurant Queen", was performed by actress Ethel Green in her vaudeville act and was published by Charles F. Smith in 1912. Of the other songs he wrote while at Yale, the most well known is the Yale fight song "Goodnight, Harvard" which he composed in 1913. This song has been recorded by several artists, including Rudy Vallée. He also wrote another fight song, "Parabalou", in 1912.Moore was a member of the Yale Glee Club from 1913 through 1915, succeeding Cole Porter as the ensemble's "soloist and stunt man". With the glee club he often starred in comedy acts that contained music that he had composed. He was also a member of the banjo and mandolin club, and notably composed Concerto for Piano and mandolins which he premiered on campus as the pianist. In May 1914 he became a member of the Wolf's Head secret society. He also performed in stage plays with the Yale Dramatic Association and the Elizabethan Club. Yale being an all-male school at that time, he often portrayed female characters on stage in drag, such as Mabel Chilters in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. Moore developed close friendships with several fellow students in these performance groups, including Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, and Cole Porter.
Originally a philosophy major, Moore didn't begin formal music studies at Yale until the fall 1913 semester when he became a pupil of David Stanley Smith who was one of his principal music teachers at Yale. His other principal teacher at Yale was Horatio Parker, who encouraged Moore to focus his music studies on composition after Parker heard works composed by Moore for the Yale Dramatic Club's productions of Walter Scott's Quentin Durward and William Shakespeare's King Lear in 1914. For those productions Moore served as conductor. He earned two degrees from Yale University, a B.A. in philosophy in 1915, and a B.M. in music composition in 1917. For his final graduate project he conducted his orchestral composition Fantaisie Polonaise. One of Moore's composition classmates at Yale was Roger Sessions.
While a student at Yale, Moore's father died in Pasadena on 18 April 1915. His father was a millionaire, and left Moore a considerable fortune which allowed him to freely pursue his music interests and live comfortably with the services of a butler and cook for the rest of his life. In the summer of 1916 he was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and he later returned to MacDowell multiple times during his career.
War Service, Paris studies, and marriage (1917–1921)
Moore further utilized his song writing skillset while serving in the United States Navy for two years during the Great War as a lieutenant from 1917 through 1919, writing songs to entertain his fellow servicemen in the Navy. One of these songs, "Destroyer Life", appeared in the 1928 anthology Songs My Mother Never Taught Me which Moore co-authored with John Jacob Niles, bringing Moore his first recognition as a songwriter. Other songs penned by Moore from this era included "Santy Anna", "When I Lays Down", "Ate My Breakfast", "Hanging Johnnie", and "Jail Song", many of them humorous accounts of life in the navy or about romantic liaisons with local women while on shore leave. He also wrote music to several poems by his friend MacLeish during this time. His songs demonstrated music influences from Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, American folk tunes, and minstrel shows.After leaving the Navy, Moore pursued graduate studies at the Schola Cantorum de Paris from 1919 through 1921, where his teachers included Vincent d'Indy and Charles Tournemire. Tournemire left his teaching post in 1920, and Moore completed his organ studies with Nadia Boulanger. From D'Indy, Moore gained a compositional style similar to César Franck who had been D'Indy's teacher. While his music later moved in other directions beyond this style, Moore credited D'Indy for giving him a grounding in musical form from which he composed during the rest of his career.
While a student in Paris, Moore returned to the United States to wed Emily Bailey, a close friend since his Hotchkiss days, on 16 September 1920 at Martha's Vineyard. They spent their honeymoon sailing the eastern coast of the United States before returning as a couple to Paris. In France, the couple were at the center of a social group of American artists all studying in Paris. These included his old Yale friend Stephen Vincent Benét, composer Quincy Porter, and pianist Bruce Simonds among others. Emily gave birth to the couple's first child, Mary, in Paris on 7 July 1921.