Ernst Toch

Ernst Toch is an Austrian-American composer and teacher known for his self-taught beginnings as a child prodigy, his avant-garde innovations during the Weimar era including the development of spoken music, his exile from Nazi Germany, and his later prolific output of symphonies, chamber works, and Hollywood film scores.

Born on December 7, 1887, in Vienna into a Jewish family, Toch secretly taught himself musical notation and composition as a young child, drawing inspiration primarily from Mozart while studying scores by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms on his own. By age seventeen he had composed six string quartets, and his Chamber Symphony in F major won the Mozart Prize in 1909, enabling formal studies at the Frankfurt Conservatory; he also received the Mendelssohn Prize for composition in 1910. In 1913 he began lecturing in piano and composition at the Mannheim College of Music, serving four years in the Austrian army during World War I.

In the postwar years Toch emerged as a leading figure in the Neue Musik movement, exploring new approaches after concluding that traditional tonality had been exhausted; he created the genre of Gesprochene Musik (spoken music), most famously with his Geographical Fugue of 1930, a fugal canon for spoken chorus using place names. Regarded as one of the preeminent avant-garde composers of the pre-Nazi era, he pursued modernist experimentation in chamber and orchestral works.

Forced to flee Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933 due to his Jewish heritage, Toch went into exile, first to Paris and London where he began composing film music, then to the United States in 1935 at the invitation of the New School for Social Research in New York. He later settled in California, teaching music and philosophy at the University of Southern California and serving as a guest lecturer at Harvard University; he also composed scores for Hollywood films during this period.

From 1950 onward Toch returned to a more traditional late-Romantic style, composing seven symphonies along with additional chamber and vocal music; he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1956 for his Third Symphony. He authored the influential music theory book The Shaping Forces in Music in 1948 and remained active as a composer until his death on October 1, 1964, in Los Angeles.