Avo Sõmer

Avo Sõmer (born 1934) is an American musicologist music theorist, and composer, of Estonian birth.

Avo Sõmer was born in Tartu, Estonia. He emigrated from Estonia with his parents in 1944, when he was ten years old, first to Germany and then to the United States. He had already begun playing the piano as a child in Pärnu. In Germany he took some piano lessons and instruction in theory, and began to compose, but systematic instruction in music came only later. He majored in music education, piano performance, and composition at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, followed by graduate studies at the University of Michigan where, in 1957, he earned an M. A. with a thesis on Monteverdi's madrigals, and then, in 1963, a PhD with a dissertation "The Keyboard Music of Johann Jakob Froberger" (Maimets 2000). In 1962 he joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. Since that time he has increased his activity as a writer, and has spoken at conferences in Estonia on the music of Eduard Tubin, twentieth-century music in general, and the theories of Heinrich Schenker.

He is best known for his analytical publications on early twentieth-century music, especially that of Debussy and the Estonian symphonist, Eduard Tubin, though his unpublished Ph. D. dissertation remains a respected work among Froberger researchers.

As a composer, Sõmer participated in Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition studio at the Darmstädter Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1967, contributing the oboe part to Ensemble (Gehlhaar 1968). He says this was a "significant moment" for him, but "mainly in a negative sense," because it made him realize he did not wish to continue with avant-garde music. Instead, he adopted a style close to that of the late works of Béla Bartók, with just a glimpse of the string quartets of Elliott Carter (Remme 2001).