Stein, Richard Heinrich

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Stein, Richard Heinrich

Stein, Richard Heinrich, German music theorist and composer; b. Halle, Feb. 28, 1882; d. Santa Brigida, Canary Islands, Aug. 11, 1942. He studied law and music, and received his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Erlangen in 1911 with the diss. Die psychologischen Grundlagen der Wundtschen Ethik. From 1914 to 1919 he lived in Spain; from 1920 to 1932 he taught in Berlin. In 1933 he settled in the Canary Islands. He was a composer of experimental tendencies; his 2 Konzertstücke for Cello and Piano, op .26 (1906), was the first composition containing quarter tones to be pubi. In 1909 he wrote a brochure giving a detailed exposition of his quarter-tone system, and in 1914 he built a quartertone clarinet. He composed about 100 piano pieces, about 50 songs, and Scherzo fantastico for Orch. He pubi, the books La musica moderna (Barcelona, 1918; in Spanish and German), Grieg (1921), and Tschaikowsky (1927)

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire