Marga Richter

Marga Richter was born in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, the daughter of the American soprano Inez Chandler and a German army captain, Paul Richter. She studied piano at the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis with Irene Hellner and with Helena Morsztyn in New York City. She entered the Juilliard School of Music in 1945 and studied composition with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti and piano with Rosalyn Tureck, graduating with a BS and then MS degree in 1951. After completing her studies, she taught music appreciation at Nassau Community College from 1971 to 1972, and later began working as a composer full-time.


Richter composed several works for the Harkness Ballet in the early 1950s. Her music was also performed, recorded, and produced on numerous albums by MGM recordings at this time. During the 1970s, two of Richter's large-scale orchestral works Landscapes of the Mind I and Blackberry Vines and Winter Fruit received significant performances, and she received a publishing contract from Carl Fischer. During the 1980s, Richter composed vocal and choral music in addition to symphonic and chamber works. Deeply connected to those in her personal world, Richter composed works to honor various individuals important to her, such as Lament for her mother, Threnody for her father, and numerous others.

Richter's musical style emphasizes chromaticism, a free use of dissonance, ostinatos, layering, rhythmic excitement, and dramatic pacing. She favored much use of seconds and sevenths. Her music often draws upon American, Irish, and Asian sources for inspiration. While she taught only a handful of students, she inspired many later women composers, including composer Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee. Richter is noted for being one of the few women composers from her time who composed music for large-scale forces: orchestra, ballet, and ensembles. Richter's only opera, Riders to the Sea, was composed in the 1990s.

Richter co-founded the Long Island Composers Alliance in 1972 with Herbert Deutsch and served as its co-director, president and vice-president. Richter has a son, pianist Michael Skelly and a daughter who is a nurse. A full-length biography of Richter was published in 2012 by the University of Illinois Press as part of their series on women composers. She died on June 25, 2020 at Barnegat, New Jersey.

Biography taken from Wikipedia.