Biographical Note
Irwin "Bud" Bazelon was born on June 4, 1922, in Evanston, Illinois. He earned his bachelor (1944) and master of music (1945) degrees from DePaul University, where his main composition teacher was Leon Stein. After briefly studying composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale University, he began lessons with Darius Milhaud at Mills College and studied analysis with Ernest Bloch at the University of California. In 1948, Bazelon moved to New York City, where he remained for the rest of his career. He earned three MacDowell Foundation Fellowships (1949, 1950, 1953), as well as a prize from the National Federation of Music Clubs for his String Quartet no. 2 (1946).
Starting in the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, Bazelon wrote music for documentaries, television commercials, and industrial productions, as well as stage plays at the American Shakespeare Festival. His most well known film compositions include the NBC production of What Makes Sammy Run? (1959), the documentary The Ivory Knife: Paul Jenkins at Work (1966), the baseball documentary The Glory of Their Times (1970), and the television movie Wilma (1977). He also created the theme music for television programs, including NBC News, from 1962 to 1977. During the 1960s, he taught courses on film music at the School of Visual Art in New York City. In 1975, he published Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music with Van Nostrand Reinhold Press, one of the earliest scholarly texts to discuss film music. A reprint with Arco Publishers was issued in 1981.
Bazelon's concert music spanned multiple genres, with nine symphonies, suites for orchestra, concertos, works for wind band, and chamber music for solo piano, percussion ensemble, and winds, among others. He used winnings from gambling to record his concert ballet Centauri 17 (1959) with members of the New York Philharmonic. In 1962, the National Symphony Orchestra premiered Bazelon's Symphony no. 2, "Testimonial to a Big City," his first composition to be played by a major ensemble. The Kansas City Philharmonic premiered his Symphony no. 1 a year later. Churchill Downs, a chamber concerto written in 1970, was a commission for Max Pollikoff's Music In Our Time series. Sound Dreams, a chamber ensemble work in memory of author James Jones, was commissioned and performed by the Collage New Music Ensemble in 1977; they later also premiered Bazelon's Legends and Love Letters for soprano and chamber orchestra in 1988. In 1982, Bazelon was awarded the Serge Koussevitzky Prize; the resulting commissioned work was Fusions for chamber orchestra. His final major orchestral work, Symphony no. 9, "Sunday Silence" premiered in 1992. His last large-scale work, Fire and Smoke for wind band, was featured at the Aspen Music Festival in 1994. Bazelon died on August 2, 1995, in New York City. At the time of his death, he was composing a tenth symphony, a text setting of Hart Crane's The Bridge.