Richard Dufallo

Richard Dufallo (b. Whiting, January 30, 1933 - d. Denton, Texas, June 16, 2000) -- Conductor, clarinetist, and author. Dufallo began his studies in clarinet performance at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago in the early 1950s. He moved on to UCLA, where he worked closely with composer and conductor Lukas Foss, who recruited Dufallo to play clarinet in his Improvisation Chamber Ensemble. He later became the Associate Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic under Foss during from 1962 to 1967. From 1965 to 1967, he was the Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic working under Bernstein. During the 1970s, he followed Darius Milhaud as the Director of the Conference on Contemporary Music at the Aspen Music Festival. Dufallo was always known as an advocate of new music and premiered several works by contemporary composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Crumb, Krzysztof Penderecki, Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, and Peter Maxwell Davies. In 1989, Oxford University Press published Dufallo's Trackings, a book of interviews with twenty-six contemporary composers, including Lukas Foss, Ned Rorem, George Crumb, Peter Maxwell Davies, David Del Tredici, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Jacob Druckman, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, György Ligeti, and Witold Lutoslawski.