On today’s date in 2013, a new work by a 90-year old German-born American composer and teacher named Ursula Mamlok received its premiere performance in Switzerland. Five Fantasy Pieces for oboe and strings was given its premiere by the great Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger and colleagues.

Ursula Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923 and began composing as a child. Her family was Jewish, and once the Nazis placed school music programs off limits to Jews, her family began holding musicales in their home, with Ursula writing the music.

After the Crystal Night pogrom in 1938, her family left Germany, and, via Ecuador, young Ursula came to America after being offered a full scholarship to study at the Mannes School of Music in New York. She became an American citizen and began teaching most notably the Manhattan School of Music.

The bulk of Mamlok’s music is for small chamber ensembles, and only once she tried to create a purely electronic piece. In a 1996 interview, she confessed, “Unfortunately I have no connection to it... I put it together in the studio at Columbia in New York, but it took too long. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’d rather use the pencil.”

Ursula Mamlok (1923 – 2016) Five Fantasy Pieces (2012/13) Heinz Holliger, ob; Hanna Weinmeister, vn; Jurg Dahler, vla; Daniel Heaflinger, vcl. Bridge 9457