Tui St. George Tucker

Career

In 1946, Tui St. George Tucker relocated to central New York City, where she lived and worked for most of her career as a composer, conductor, and recorder player, primarily in Greenwich Village. There she became part of an avant-garde circle that included John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Virgil Thomson. Her composition Indian Summer: Three Microtonal Antiphons on Psalm Texts, for two baritones and chamber ensemble, was an early work using quarter tones.

That same year, she met German-American poet and scholar Vera Lachmann, beginning a lifelong partnership. Starting in 1947, Tucker spent summers at Camp Catawba near Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where Lachmann had founded the camp two years earlier and appointed Tucker music director. She led campers in music ranging from medieval plainsong and organum to works by contemporary American composers; pianist Grete Sultan also taught there for several summers.

Many of Tucker’s best-known pieces come from this period, including the Peyote Sonata (1956), which features polyrhythms and a 15:16 phrase; a chamber work dedicated to Krzysztof Penderecki; and the eight-movement cantata Drum Taps (1973), set to a Walt Whitman libretto.

Discography

Little Pieces for Quartertone Piano (1972) appears on the album In tune – tune in! Music for quarter-tone piano by Elisa Järvi. Indian Summer: Three Microtonal Antiphons on Psalm Texts was released on LP by Opus One around 1984. String Quartet No. 1 also appeared on Opus One around 1986.

Herzliebster Jesu was included on a Spectrum CD in 1988. Piano Sonata No. 2, 'The Peyote' was released on Opus One around 1991. The Music of Tui St. George Tucker was issued by Centaur in 1998.

Did You Know?

• Tucker was born in Fullerton, California, to an English father and a mother from New Zealand.
• Her family called her 'Tui' after a bird native to New Zealand, where her mother was born.
• She attended Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles and Occidental College from 1941 to 1944.