Morten Lauridsen

The music of composer and educator Morten Lauridsen is widely known through his performances, recordings, and sheet music in the U.S. and elsewhere. His works are primarily choral, but he has also written some music for voices and instruments. Lauridsen writes in a distinctive idiom, tonal and melodic but serene and spare, and his output encompasses both sacred and secular compositions. His works have appeared on more than 200 albums, including Prayer: The Songs of Morten Lauridsen (2024).

Morten Johannes Lauridsen, III was born in Colfax, Washington. His father, Morten Johannes Lauridsen, Jr., was a U.S. Forest Service employee who later worked for the Internal Revenue Service, and the younger Lauridsen manned an isolated fire lookout tower as young man. Lauridsen attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Switching to composition, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied with <a href="spotify:artist:1QGz8axbslRTy0tJQWvdcr">Halsey Stevens</a>, <a href="spotify:artist:6sQOWTl9h3Wot9zbCLJ3Pm">Robert Linn</a>, and <a href="spotify:artist:7g9GGEm3YlVkxJu5U76aPu">Ingolf Dahl</a>. Soon after receiving a graduate degree in 1967, he joined the USC faculty, where he spent his entire life as an educator, retiring in 2019. He served from 1990 to 2002 as chair of the composition department and was noted for establishing a program in film and television scoring. His own compositions began to circulate while he was still a student; his song cycle A Backyard Universe, for tenor and piano appeared in 1965. In the '70s and '80s, after personal and creative crises, he experimented with various compositional procedures, including 12-tone serialism.

Lauridsen's appointment as composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 1994 boosted his productivity and gained broad attention for his music, both within and beyond the U.S. His motet O magnum mysterium, composed that year and issued in both choral and voice-and-piano versions, became one of his most popular works and has been recorded multiple times in Britain by the singers of the La Maîtrise de Notre-Dame choir school in Paris, and by the Härlanda Chamber Choir in Sweden, among many other groups. Lauridsen has served as a guest composer at more than 100 U.S. colleges and universities. He has maintained a home in Washington state, on an island off its Pacific coast, where he often does creative work. Another popular Lauridsen work is the non-liturgical requiem mass Lux Aeterna; a 2008 recording of the work by the Los Angeles Master Chorale became one of five albums featuring Lauridsen's music to earn Grammy Award nominations. The <a href="spotify:artist:1TQJoqACwhfrAKXA9WwO4v">Chamber Choir of Europe</a> recording, Light Eternal: The Choral Music of Morten Lauridsen (2018), also contained the work and broadened exposure to Lauridsen's music abroad. In 2024, baritone <a href="spotify:artist:49RlboDcE5w597pvezkQR6">Jeremy Huw Williams</a> issued the album Prayer: The Songs of Morten Lauridsen; by that time, well over 40 of Lauridsen's compositions were available on recordings. Sheet music copies of his compositions remain perennial best-sellers, and his works reside in the repertories of American choirs great and small. In 2006, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts named Lauridsen an American Choral Master, and the following year, he received the National Medal of the Arts from President <a href="spotify:artist:2JZbcOAw67koOHlFTjMeGX">George W. Bush</a>. ~ James Manheim, Rovi