California Lutheran University Confers Honorary Doctorate to Celebrated Composer Morten Lauridsen

For the last five decades, Morten Lauridsen has been regarded as one of the country’s top living vocal composers. His beautifully melodic works, which express myriad emotions and symbolism, have been nominated for five Grammy Awards and recorded for listeners worldwide. In reverence for Lauridsen’s lifetime of achievement in music and his tireless commitment to elevating the experience for students, musicians and listeners, California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Calif., awarded him an honorary doctorate at its 2026 Commencement Ceremony.

“It’s a great honor and really quite beyond words for me,” Lauridsen said. “I’ve had a wonderful relationship with this terrific university for many, many years. And I admire colleges that give the students a grounding in the liberal arts and sciences for dealing with life later on, and California Lutheran University is amongst the top universities that I am aware of doing exactly that.”

James Arthur Bond, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Cal Lutheran, has published many scholarly articles illuminating the interdisciplinary and interpretive contexts of Lauridsen’s compositions. He is currently writing a biography on the composer.

“Few can hold a candle to the composer’s rubato and jazz and cabaret-inflected style of accompanying his own pieces,” Bond said. “Partly this problem stems from discerning the layers the composer has built into his music — infusing his works with multiple styles and strands of music.”

Lauridsen’s musical approaches range from direct to abstract and are in response to the subject matter, language, style, structure and historical era, among others. For example, his sacred pieces draw from Gregorian chant with Medieval and Renaissance motives, but are tinged with a contemporary sound.

During Lauridsen’s lauded career, he was named an “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts and was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush at a special White House ceremony. He was the composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and in 2016 was honored with the ASCAP Foundation Life In Music Award. 

For over 40 years, Lauridsen has been a distinguished professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and founded the university’s Advanced Studies program in film scoring. Lauridsen has held residencies as guest composer/lecturer at over 70 universities.