William Susman

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Birth name William Joseph Susman
Nationality USA
Birth 29 august 1960 (64 years) at Chicago (USA)

William Joseph Susman (born August 29, 1960) is an American composer of concert and film music and a pianist. He belongs to the generation of American composers that came of age in the late twentieth century and received traditional academic training while remaining thoroughly engaged with popular music (in his case, jazz). Susman has written orchestral and chamber music for concert performance, as well as documentary film scores.

His first major work and earliest recognition was for Pentateuch for soprano, three choral groups and divisi orchestra, which caught the attention of Earle Brown at the BMI awards in 1985. At Brown's recommendation, he received a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation. For his Fromm commission he composed Trailing Vortices (1986) for chamber orchestra which had performances at the Aspen Music festival as well as the Alicante and Gaudeamus music festivals both conducted by Ernest Bour. Trailing Vortices was inspired by photographs found in An Album of Fluid Motion by Milton Van Dyke. He then applied the acoustical concepts of Shepard tones and the studies of Jean Claude Risset to create an "aural translation" of trailing vortices.