Ernst Krenek was an Austrian-American composer, born in Vienna in 1900, who studied and worked in Berlin and various German opera houses before emigrating to the United States in 1938, where he taught at Vassar College, Hamline University, and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto before settling in California. His large output spans operas, symphonies, string quartets, piano works, and vocal music, moving across late-Romantic, atonal, neo-classical, twelve-tone, serial, and aleatoric styles over his long career. He died in Palm Springs, California in 1991, aged 91.

Krenek achieved international fame with his 1926 jazz opera Jonny spielt auf, which later became a target of Nazi persecution despite his non-Jewish background, and he went on to become, alongside Schoenberg, one of the pioneering figures in twelve-tone and serial composition, later embracing electronic techniques as well. His stylistic restlessness and prolific theoretical writings on composition made him an influential teacher and a significant bridge figure across the major modernist movements of the twentieth century.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Krenek