Wallingford Riegger

Wallingford Riegger (b. Albany, Georgia, April 29, 1885 – d. New York City, April 2, 1961) – Composer, conductor, and cellist. Not long after his father’s lumber mill burned in 1888, Riegger and his family moved from Georgia to Indianapolis, when he was just a young boy. According to Indiana Composers: Native and Adopted (Indiana University, 1936), he graduated from Indianapolis Manuel High School; however, numerous other sources state that the family moved to New York City via Louisville by 1900, when the composer would have been in his mid teens. Nonetheless, Riegger studied music at Juilliard and the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Teaching appointments included stints at Drake University (1918-1922, theory and cello) and multiple institutions in New York, where he spent the last several decades of his life. Among his accolades were a Paderewski Prize for Trio in B Minor in 1921 and the International Coolidge Prize for his La belle dame sans merci (a chamber work) in 1924. For his Symphony No. 3 (1948), he won New York Music Critics’ Circle Award and Naumburg Foundation Recording Award. Although his early works were somewhat conservative, by 1926 he established a modern style that was freely atonal, highly contrapuntal, and rhythmically vital. His conservative Dance Rhythms (1954) has become a popular piece with youth orchestras. Known as an articulate spokesman for modernism, Riegger died at the age of seventy-five as a result of a head injury incurred by tripping over the leashes of two fighting dogs.