The Music of Alec Wilder in New York City

An Annual Celebration of the Life and Music of Alec Wilder

Featuring prominent NYC musicians performing the instrumental solo, chamber music and songs of Alec Wilder.

Alec Wilder successfully bridged a diversity of styles, writing fresh, strong, and lyrical music for a myriad of musicians with significant careers and reputations. His oeuvre includes popular songs, art songs, instrumental sonatas, chamber music works, compositions for large ensembles, opera, film scores, and theater pieces. It is a normal human impulse to want to categorize and label objects to assume that one has reached a clarity of comprehension and understanding. However, such categorizations can often be simplistic or even misleading. Alec Wilder’s music is a product of his life philosophies mingled with the sounds of his time; whether popular, jazz, or concert music. His merging of musical styles and genres is not unlike several of his fellow Americans such as George Gershwin or Leona rd Bernstein. His songs may appear in NYC night clubs as well as on formal voice recitals, and his instrumental ensemble works enhance university recitals across the nation. He inserts canons into his jazz pieces, warm popular harmonies into his art songs, and syncopated jazz rhythms into his classical movements. His sound is uniquely Alec Wilder and distinctly American. Wilder valued beauty, aesthetic integrity, decency, virtue, wonderment, and patience and deplored any decline of such values. He stated, “My concern is to transmute the very best of myself into disciplined, loving, and if possible, witty and civilized sound. I am interested in only those manifestations of art which, in my estimation, emerge from a profound need to create and an absolute in sistence upon a professional point of view.” Trusting his intuitive creative inclinations and merging minimal traditional music studies with an absorption of the current musical trends of his time, Alec Wilder was able to produce music that is distinctively his own in concept and sound, a worthy achievement indeed.