Beatrice Witkin


Beatrice Braverman Witkin was an American composer and pianist who was best known for her electronic music, especially the theme she composed for the TV show Wild, Wild World of Animals in 1973.
Witkin studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Roger Sessions, Mark Brunswick and Stefan Wolpe. She received a B.A. from Hunter College and a master's degree from New York University. She married Louis Witkin in 1938 and they had one daughter and one son.
Witkin received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hebrew Arts Music School. She released two LPs of chamber music, and received the Creative Arts Public Service Grant and the ASCAP Standard Award.
In 1963, Witkin helped establish the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, a performing group that commissioned new works. She was a guest composer at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire as well as a longtime member of the Women's Composers Forum and ASCAP. In 1968, she was invited to work at the Electronic Music Studio at the New York University School of the Arts. Two years later, her electronic composition Glissines was a winner in High Fidelity magazine's Electronic Music Contest.
Witkin's papers are at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
Her compositions include:

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