Composer and University of Washington professor emerita Diane Thome died peacefully Sunday, January 12, at home in Seattle, attended by close friends and her sister Mona. Former chair of the composition program at the UW, Thome served on the School of Music faculty from 1977 to 2006.
Born January 25, 1942, Thome declared her intention to become a composer at the age of eight and began her studies in composing at age twelve with teacher Robert Strassburg. She cited his influence, along with that of her own supportive mother, as key to her early creative development. Influential teachers including Dorothy Taubman, Milton Babbitt, Roy Harris, Alexander Boscovich, and Darius Milhaud made a deep impact on her as she earned a series of music degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, Eastman School of Music, and Princeton University.
Thome set herself apart early in her academic career at Eastman by mastering the performance of complex piano compositions by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Mussorgsky, a feat that earned her the institution’s prestigious Performer's Certificate in Piano and stimulated her interest in exploring challenging repertoire. She forged ahead with a curiosity that led her into uncharted musical territory. At Princeton, where she was the first woman to receive a composition Ph.D, she found herself a pioneer in the burgeoning field of computer music at a time when only Princeton and Stanford among American universities offered studies in the field.
Over the course of Thome's life, her works received performances in Europe, China, Australia, Israel, Canada, and the United States. She was invited to be composer-in-residence at numerous institutions, including at the University of Sussex. Bennington College, and the University of Cincinnati. She also spent time as a guest of the Ecole Nationale Claude Debussy, and during this time was featured on French radio.
Thome received many honors for her work, including Washington Composer of the Year (1994), Solomon Katz Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (1995–1996), and an International Computer Music Conference Commission (1998).
Among her better-known works are Night Passage, an environmental theatre-piece; Angels, a virtual-reality artwork for computer; and Unseen Buds, for mixed choir and computer-realized sound.
Thome’s music was strongly electro-acoustic in style, and was recorded on labels such as CRI, Crystal Records, Capstone, Leonarda, and Centaur. Among these recordings were two monographic discs, Palaces of Memory and Bright Air/Brilliant Fire.
In her 2016 memoir, Palaces of Memory (Friesen Press), Thome recalled some of the challenges and triumphs of her professional life as a composer and professor. She faced chauvinism, conservative musical culture, and life-altering health challenges, but found the affirmative counterbalance in transformative teachers, colleagues, friends, partners, and others who introduced her to intriguing repertoire and new ways of thinking and being. In the process, she ultimately discovered her own distinctive artistic voice, with poetry, nature, and the mystical realms providing a wellspring of inspiration, and electronic and digital tools a palette of sonic opportunity.
Sources
Palaces of Memory: American Composer Diane Thome on her Life and Music (Friesen Press), 2016, Diane Thome
Diane Thome obituary at the Violin Channel
Seattle Times obituary