Otto Luening

Otto Luening (1900–1996) was born in Milwaukee and trained in Munich and Zurich, studying with Ferruccio Busoni, before returning to the United States in 1924 to work as an opera conductor in Chicago and at the Eastman School of Music. He joined Columbia University’s faculty in 1944, and in 1952 began collaborating with fellow Columbia composer Vladimir Ussachevsky on tape-recorder music — pieces for flute and manipulated tape premiered that year at the Museum of Modern Art under Leopold Stokowski, among the first electronic works heard in an American concert setting. Luening’s own tape pieces, including Fantasy in Space and Low Speed (both 1952), extended his flute playing into the new medium through recording and splicing. In 1959, with Ussachevsky, Milton Babbitt, and Roger Sessions, he co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the oldest electroacoustic music center in the United States.