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Michael Torke (; born September 22, 1961) is an American composer who writes music influenced by jazz and minimalism.
Torke was born in Milwaukee, where he attended Wilson Elementary School, graduated from Wauwatosa East High School, and studied at the Eastman School of Music with Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse, and at Yale University.
A synesthesia, he is the composer of numerous pieces that include colors in the titles ( Bright Blue Music, Ecstatic Orange), later made into the suite Color Music (1991). Other pieces include the opera The Directions (1986), Rust (1989), influenced by rap and disco, Telephone Book (1985, 1995), Adjustable Wrench, and Ash (1989) and Mass (1990), which received criticism for an attempt at the style of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
In 2003, he created his own record label, Ecstatic Records, on which he re-released a set of six 1990s CDs that were deleted by the now out-of-business Argo Records, which was a subsidiary of Decca Records.
His opera Pop'pea, a rock opera version of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, was commissioned by the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and premiered there on May 29, 2012. " Pop'pea - Monteverdi version vidéo-pop", Le Parisien,
Pop'pea (31 May 2012) review by Stephen J. Mudge, Opera News, August 2012, vol. 77, no. 2
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