Noel Da Costa
*Noel Da Costa was born on this date in 1929. He was a Black Nigerian-Jamaican composer, jazz violinist, and choral conductor.
Noel G. Da Costa was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to parents from Kingston, Jamaica, who were Salvation Army missionaries. After returning to Jamaica while Da Costa was young, they emigrated to Harlem, New York. It was here that he started violin lessons at the age of 11. While in High School, he was inspired by one of his teachers to work in an artistic field. Da Costa completed his bachelor's at Queens College in 1952 and his master's in theory and composition at Columbia University in 1956. He also studied in Florence, Italy, under a Fulbright Fellowship.
1961, he taught at Hampton University and the City University of New York. Da Costa was also a co-founder of the Society of Black Composers. He was an accomplished violinist, playing his works as well as both classical and jazz music; he played on albums by Les McCann, Roland Kirk, Bernard Purdie, Roberta Flack, McCoy Tyner, Donny Hathaway, Felix Cavaliere, Willis Jackson, Eddie Kendricks, and others. His first music set to poetry was Tambourines by Langston Hughes.
He also worked with choral groups, becoming the director of the Triad Choral in 1974, and played with the Symphony of the New World and several orchestras on Broadway theatre productions. He was married to Patricia, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Da Costa's works infuse elements of jazz, Caribbean, and African music into the framework of Western classical music. The New York Times has described his music as "conservatively chromatic."
In addition to exploring Caribbean musical traditions and Black American spirituals, Da Costa also explored freely atonal music and serialism, as seen in his Five Verses/With Vamps (1968), Occurrence for Six (1965), and Four Preludes (1973) for trombone and piano. In 1970, he accepted a position at Rutgers University, where he taught until 2001. He died the following year at 72 on April 29, 2002.
To Become a musician or Singer
To Become a Conductor or Composer
