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Performing Arts Library Special Collections in Performing Arts ABA Research Center 
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Ostwald Award Archives
Winner 1968: Karl Kroeger, Divertimento for Concert Band [Listen]
Biography:
Karl Kroeger was born on April 13, 1932 in Louisville, Kentucky. He studied at the University of Louisville where he received a B.M. in composition in 1954 and an M.M. in composition in 1959. His major composition teachers were Claude Almand and George Perle. In 1960 he enrolled at the University of Illinois, receiving an M.S. degree in 1961; there, he studied composition with Gordon Binkerd. In 1962 he was appointed head of the American Music Collection at the New York Public Library, a position he retained until 1964. In that year he received a Ford Foundation fellowship to be composer-in-residence to the public school system of Eugene, Oregon under their Composers in Public Schools program. He spent 1964-1967 in Oregon. In 1967, he received an appointment as teacher of composition and theory at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. In 1968, he left to pursue a doctoral degree, first at the University of Wisconsin (1968-69) and then at Brown University (1969-71) where he received a Ph.D. in musicology in 1976. From 1971 to 1972, he was on the faculty of the Music Department at Moorhead State University in Moorhead, Minnesota. In 1972, he was appointed Director of the Moravian Music Foundation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a position he retained until 1980. In 1980, he received a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to be a visiting lecturer at Keele University in England. The following year he received the first of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to prepare volumes of The Complete Works of William Billings for the American Musicological Society. In 1982 he became Head of the Music Library at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a position from which he retired in 1994. He now lives near Boulder, where he is engaged in scholarly work and composition.
Kroeger has composed over 100 works for a variety of performance groups. Among these are six works for concert band: Variations on a Moravian Chorale (1982), Divertimento (1967), Prologue and Dance (1965), Variations on a Hymn by William Billings (1964), and Design (1956). He also composed a Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Ensemble (1982). Divertimento is published by Boosey and Hawkes, Variations on a Hymn by William Billings is published by Joseph Boonin and the other works for band are available from the composer.
Source:
Correspondence with the composer.
