Maury, Lowndes, 1911-1975

Lowndes Maury was born in Butte, Montana, in 1911 to H. Lowndes Maury and Anne Perkins Maury. He learned piano from his mother. In 1931, he graduated from the University of Montana--Missoula and went on to study piano and composition in Chicago. He also studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Boston.

Beginning in the 1930s, he built a career in Hollywood as a pianist, composer-arranger, and conductor. For a time he worked as a composer, arranger, pianist, and organist on twelve radio shows simultaneously, including the Eddie Cantor and Jack Haley shows Life with Father and The Life of Riley . He wrote film scores for Universal Pictures studios, for U.S. Air Force training films, and for the Mr. Magoo cartoons. He was also a contract pianist for Twentieth-Century Fox studios.

He also composed considerable "serious" music. Among his major works is the cantata Proud Music of the Storm (Walt Whitman), commissioned for the dedication of the new music building at the University of Montana in 1953. Other commissioned works included "Summer of Green," a rhapsody for alto flute and string orchestra, which was premiered by the New Zealand National Orchestra; "Night Life," for Kurt Reher, principal cellist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; and Man is My Song, a cantata written for the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles.

In later years, he established the Lou Muary Piano School in North Hollywood. There his interest in the pedagogy of music resulted in two volumes of student and artist piano pieces called New Soundings. He also developed a new approach to music notation with Ralph Cromleigh, a computer analyst for Teledyne Systems, and brought out four volumes of Magic Lines and Spaces.

His Variations on a Beethoven Theme was commissioned and recorded by harpsichordist Igor Kipnis, and his violin sonata In Memory of the Korean War Dead was recorded by the composer with violinist Myron Sandler.

In 1964, he was cited by the Montana Territorial Centennial Committee for distinguished service in the field of original composition. In 1974, the University of Montana awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.

He died in 1975.

From the guide to the Lowndes Maury Papers, 1933-2001, (University of Montana--Missoula Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections)