On her music

It is not easy to describe the music of Gloria Coates. It contains so many factors, that one always misses aspects in a description. In fact, there is only one way to really encounter these aspects: by listening to her music.
In most articles, liner notes and reviews on the music of Gloria Coates you can find two constant factors: The structure of her music and comparison to other composers.

Structure
Most music of Gloria Coates is "characterized by extremely strict, even rigid technical procedures (canonic structures), which are often worked out with unusual musical materials (glissandi)." (from Giselher Schubert's liner notes for CD CPO 999 392-2).
But this is only part of the music. Schubert continues: "In this way, a productive tension results not only between material and technique (...an attempt to give structure to chaos), but even more so between what would have to be termed "sober-technical" compositional principles and the genuine direct expressive power and emotionality of the music." For me, 'In the Fifth Dimension' from her String Quartet No.5 (to name just one of many works) is a wonderful example, consisting solely of impressive and wonderful glissandi, nine minutes long. A very beautiful composition, technically complex, but at the same time creating wonderful images and filled with emotion.

Comparison
Gloria Coates' music has often been compared to the music of (early) Penderecki and Xenakis. Technically spoken, one can understand this comparison, since they too used glissandi in many or most of their compositions. But that is where the comparison stops. Where Gloria Coates succeeds in creating a world of her own and creating an emotionality and expressiveness through this technical approach, Xenakis in particular has used his mathematical approach to avoid emotions. Kyle Gann explains (in chambermusic 23, February 2003): "Clearly, she is a modernist. Her music is large, emotive, sometimes bursting with angst, bristling with dissonance that erupts into noise. Superficially, she has affinities to the so-called "Polish school" that was once centered around Krzysztof Penderecki and the 1960s works of György Ligeti, an aesthetic that got tired of the serialist obsession with pitch and worked instead with pure sound masses and orchestral effects of which pitch was a minor component. The medium in which Coates paints her backgrounds are not complex pitch sets but tone clusters and harsh dissonances.
That's how Coates's music sounds from the outside. But when you pick up a score and start to take it apart, a funny thing happens. You notice canons, and palindromes , and structures made by different tempos running at the same time. You find quotations, and passages of simple, even stirring tonality, entire pieces built of major triads. You even find arithmetical rhythmic processes, ostinatos, figures obsessively repeated-heavens, it even starts to look minimalist. How does Coates's music manage to sound so big and messy on the outside, yet look so clean and simple on the inside? How did this atonal-expressionist become a postminimalist-or vice versa?"

Genres
Gloria Coates has written works in most genres. Among the many orchestral works, she has written an impressive body of symphonies (counting fourteen in 2003). Another constant factor in her music are vocal works with piano or orchestral accompaniment. She as also written many chamber music works, including eight string quartets.