Composer Profile
Carlisle Floyd (1926–2021) by Kristin Rasmussen
Carlisle Floyd (1926–2021) was an American composer from the small town of Latta, South Carolina. Floyd found much of his inspiration in his traditional Southern childhood. His father was a Methodist minister who was assigned to several small South Carolina towns and his mother gave him his first introduction to music, teaching him piano and hosting poetry readings and hymn sings in their home.
Floyd enrolled at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, only three hours from his hometown, in 1943. Here, Floyd trained with Ernst Bacon, an American composer, pianist, and conductor who had a significant influence on his style and dramatic decisions.
A few years after Floyd began his undergraduate studies, Bacon took a job at Syracuse University in New York, and Floyd followed earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degree here. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Syracuse, Floyd was hired to the piano faculty at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He remained there for 30 years, eventually becoming professor of composition.
Floyd’s interest in composition developed during his studies at Syracuse. He utilized his previous talents as a playwright (he won a one-act play competition during his undergrad) to write his first operas. His third try, Susannah (after the biblical story of Susannah and the Elder), was a huge success. The opera was first performed in Tallahassee in 1955 before being taken up by the New York City Opera in 1956. It was met with high praise, and the composer received a New York Music Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other honors. Susannah was also chosen to represent American opera at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. Susannah has become a staple of the American opera repertoire, after only Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) and Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951) in terms of popularity. Following Susannah, Floyd spent the following 25 years writing a slew of operas, almost all of them set in America and based on American subjects, themes or previously written works.
Floyd departed Florida State University in 1976 to take up a similar position at the University of Houston, where he co-founded and directed the Houston Opera Studio and maintained a close relationship with the Houston Grand Opera. Beginning in 1981, Floyd took a 20-year break from composition and retired from teaching in 1996. In the 2000s, Floyd returned to the composing scene, but at a slower pace, with Cold Sassy Tree (2000), an opera set in Georgia and based on American writer Olive Ann Burns' novel. Floyd also worked on music outside of the stage, most notably revisiting and recording a piano sonata he composed in the 1950s. The Houston Grand Opera staged Floyd's last opera, Prince of Players, in March 2016. Floyd died in 2021 and was survived by his four nieces.
Floyd's operas are guided by an unwavering pragmatism. His work is best seen as a nostalgic continuation of the 1930s and 1940s populist (social realism) movement, of which Bacon was a prominent member. For Floyd, this takes the form of an all-purpose structure of harmonies built on fourths and parallel 5ths, underpinning tunes evocative of diverse American folk genres. His later operas, beginning with Of Mice and Men (1969), demonstrate increasing chromaticism and rhythmic flexibility. Notably, Floyd penned his own librettos and did not allow the music to entirely run the show. He relied on dramaturgy for emotional effect: directives for facial expressions are particularly specific and emotional climaxes are frequently represented by moments of silence or spoken dialogue.
You can experience Floyd’s enthusiasm for American subjects in our 2026 Festival Season production of Of Mice and Men, conducted by his own long-time assistant, Christopher James Ray! [Visit www.dmmo.org/tickets or call the box office at 515-209-3257 to learn more!]