Composer, born in Philadelphia, PA. A pianist and composer as a youth, he enrolled in 1924 in the newly established Curtis Institute to study composition. He went on to study with Boulanger in Paris and Schoenberg in Berlin, where he encountered the socially conscious works of Brecht and Weill. In the 1930s he began to write pieces with explicit social themes for the musical theatre, notably The Cradle Will Rock (1937), and he became a member of the Communist Party (1938--49). After serving in the US Air Force in World War 2, which inspired his Airborne Symphony (1946), he returned to writing works for the musical stage; the most ambitious of these was Regina (1949), but none of them achieved the success of his adaptation of the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera (1954).