Zaimont, Judith Lang

Performer versus Composer

Born November 8, 1945, in Memphis, Tennessee, Zaimont grew up in Queens, New York. She began her musical training at age 5, and by the time she was 11, she was composing her first pieces for the piano. A year later, she received a scholarship to study at Julliard. At the same time, she and her younger sister proved successful as duo-pianists, making their Carnegie Hall debut in 1963. Performing was a more lucrative choice, but Zaimont determined at 16 that she would focus on composition. She received a B.A. in music from Queens College in 1966, the same year she won the BMI Young Composer Award. The Lang sisters performed through 1967, but Judith had decided that by interest and temperament she was a composer. She received a master of arts degree in composition from Columbia University in 1978.

Critics have praised the lyricism of her work and her use of color and idiom and have noted influences ranging from Debussy and Ravel to Stravinsky. Working in most musical genres, she has composed symphonies, oratorios, opera, a wide variety of chamber works, and solo music for string and wind instruments, piano, and organ. She is particularly well known for her sensitivity to textual nuance and has drawn inspiration from Jewish sacred texts; from poets as varied as Shakespeare, Blake, and Baudelaire; and from ethnic works by Native Americans. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Composers Forum, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Zaimont's music has been performed across the United States and around the world.

Distinguished Teaching Career

Her distinguished 35-year teaching career includes service on the faculties of Queens College and Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music, Adelphi University, and the University of Minnesota (1992–2005), where she was a professor of composition and a scholar of the College of Liberal Arts. An interest in the history of women in music led her to propose the monumental The Musical Woman: An International Perspective (3 volumes, Greenwood Press, 1989). Her editorship of these volumes led to a research grant [Page 1604]from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Pauline Alderman Award for outstanding scholarship on women in music.

Zaimont retired from full-time teaching in 2005, but she continues to serve as a clinician and lecturer, to record her music, and to compose. She has said that all parts of her identity—wife, mother, thinker, scholar, and teacher—are connected to who she is as a composer. Ever innovative, in 2009, she and her husband, the painter Gary Zaimont, collaborated on videos that utilized her music and his art.

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