Musicatlas
Music
- Suite for Orchestra (1936)
- Symphony No. 1 (1947)
- Safari (1956)
- Conquerors of the Ages (1957)
- Symphony No. 2 (n.d.)
- Three String Quartets
- Three Piano Sonatas
Life
Edmond De Luca was born in Philadelphia and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music; he took composition and theory with William Happich and piano with Leo Ornstein. In 1936, his Suite for Orchestra won a composition competition hosted by the Philadelphia Orchestra and was performed by them. He graduated from Juilliard in 1943 and then De Luca’s First Symphony won first prize in another competition, this time hosted by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. De Luca’s best-known works were orchestral suites commission by David L. Miller of Trans World Records, “Safari” and “Conquerors of the Ages,” originally recorded by the “Trans World Symphony Orchestra,” later known as the 101 Strings Orchestra and, in actuality, the Hamburg Symphony. Both tasty and tasteless, these albums were popular among audiophiles in the days of early stereo, but their lushly romantic, highly cinematic style did not establish De Luca as a composer worthy of serious consideration by the classical establishment of the day. Oddly, De Luca is not known to have worked in the motion picture industry, where his talents would have situated him well.