Karl Kroeger

1971: Divertimento for Concert Band

Karl Kroeger (b. 1932) received a bachelor’s and master’s of music from the University of Louisville, where he studied with Claude Almand, and pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Illinois, where he studied with Gordon Binkerd. He began doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison but completed his PhD at Brown University.

Kroeger was head of the American Music Collection at the New York Public Library from 1962 to 1964 and director of the Moravian Music Foundation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Kroeger has served on the music faculty at Ohio University and the University of Colorado, and was head of the music library at the University of Colorado–Boulder. As a musicologist, Kroeger received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to prepare volumes of The Complete Works of William Billings for the American Musicological Society.

Kroeger has composed over 100 works for a variety of performance groups, including his Divertimento for Concert Band, which was selected as the winning composition for the 1971 ABA Ostwald Award.