Joaquín Nin-Culmell

Joaquín Maria Nin-Culmell (5 September 1908 – 14 January 2004) was a Cuban-Spanish composer, internationally known concert pianist, and emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley.

Joaquín Nin-Culmell was born in Berlin, Germany, the youngest child of Cuban singer Rosa Culmell and pianist-composer Joaquín Nin. After his parents separated, his mother moved Nin-Culmell, his sister Anaïs and brother Thorvald, to New York City, where they lived for nine years.

At age fifteen, Nin-Culmell and his family moved to Europe where he attended the Schola Cantorum and the Paris Conservatoire, receiving a first prize in music composition there in 1934. He was a student of Paul Dukas and also studied in the early 1930s with Manuel de Falla, Spain's foremost composer, focusing on harmony, counterpoint and fugue, as well as musical composition.

In 1939, Nin-Culmell moved to the United States. He taught at Middlebury College, Vermont for two years before joining the music department of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts (where Stephen Sondheim was one of his students). He stayed at Williams for a decade, before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1950.

While at Berkeley, he conducted the University of California Symphony Orchestra and appeared as a pianist with numerous musical groups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

...
Wikipedia