American composer and musicologist Claire Polin (1926-1995) was born in Philadelphia on New Year’s Day 1926 to parents who had emigrated from the Ukraine prior to the Russian Revolution. She began her piano studies at age five. When she was 17, she was stricken with double pneumonia, and a doctor suggested that learning the flute would give her lungs a better chance to recover. Thus began her voyage into the world of the flute, first as a pupil of Burnett Atkinson and later with the so-called grandfather of American flutists, William Kincaid, with whom she later collaborated on The Art and Practice of Modern Flute Technique and The Advanced Flutist.

Polin earned degrees from Temple University, Dropsie College, Gratz College, as well as a Master of Music degree in Composition from Juilliard and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Philadelphia Conservatory (where her thesis was on Comparative Aesthetics, then classified as Allied Arts). She studied composition with Otto Luening, Roger Sessions, Peter Mennin, and William Schuman at Juilliard; Vincent Persichetti at the Philadelphia Conservatory; and Lukas Foss at Tanglewood.

From the 1960s on, Polin juggled responsibilities as professor of both Art History and General Music at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. As the recipient of the Leverhulme Fellowship, she spent a year abroad teaching at the University College of Wales, mentoring a class that included a 21-year-old King Charles. In addition to helping create the Kincaid Flute Method, she completed and annotated Kincaid’s edition of the flute sonatas of J.S. Bach.

Beginning in the 1980s, during the cultural embargo between the U.S. and Soviet Union, Polin traveled to Russia 13 times to interface with avant-garde composers, bringing American compositions in exchange for Soviet scores and presenting a series of “unofficial” exchange concerts in Philadelphia and New York. In collaboration with her son, the violinist Gabriel Schaff, Polin was personally responsible for countless Soviet and American premieres by such luminaries as Edison Denisov, Elena Firsova, Sofia Gubaidulina, Giya Kancheli, Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Dmitri Smirnov, among many others.

Despite the pervasive limitations faced by women composers in her time, Polin was the winner of several awards and fellowships, including the Vercelli International, Georgia State University, twice from Delta Omicron, the MacDowell Colony, Leverhulme Foundation, and numerous ASCAP awards. Her works were commissioned and performed by the Seoul National Symphony Orchestra, London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble, New York Philharmonia, Israel Bach Society, London Pro Musica Antiqua, Huntingdon Chamber Players, the City of Philadelphia, as well as by William Kincaid, Gordon Gottlieb, Juris Piano Duo, and Gregg Smith Singers. Her scholarly publications cover a range of topics including 17th-century harp tablature, ethnomusicology, Soviet composers and performers, and the iconic 1989 article “Why Minimalism Now?”. Her music shows a similar diversity of influences: Greek myth, the legend of Gilgamesh, Welsh epic poetry, the metaphysical writings of John Donne and T.S. Eliot, Native American chants, Trans-Ural folk melodies, and birdsong, to name but a few. 

Polin’s music is published by Hal Leonard, Theodore Presser, Subito Music, Dorn Music, and Arsis Press. Since her passing in 1995, most of her recordings are still available only on vinyl.