In 1978, a sensation at the Warsaw Autumn Festival was caused by a woman composer's sonically groundbreaking opus, which bore the soberly descriptive title Music on Open Strings: music on empty (nonfingered) strings. At that time, being a woman made an eminent difference in one's artistic career. When Gloria Coates appeared with this work on the musica viva programme in Munich in 1980, it was the first work by a woman composer to be performed since the concert series was founded in 1946. Music on Open Strings is a particularly successful example of the radical path taken by the American composer and remains one of her best-known works to this day.

There is also a historical model for the two vocal works Wir tönen allein and Cette blanche agonie completed in 1988: the orchestral song. The Mallarmé setting takes on an additional concertante character due to the inclusion of a wind soloist, who is required to play virtuosically almost throughout. For her orchestral songs, Coates chose posthumously published, late poems by Paul Celan (1920–1970) and Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898), these being texts by two poets who were considered radical in their time, whose sometimes cryptic content invites many different interpretations.

Coates's 16th Symphony was also initially located outside her catalogued symphonic series. It was written as Time Frozen for chamber orchestra to mark the 25th anniversary of the Hamburg concert series "das neue werk". After a later revision, resulting in new movement titles among other features, the piece became her last contribution to the genre. Even if music as an art of time ultimately eludes the idea of being frozen, i.e. at a standstill, it is still possible to play with different concepts of time in a musically meaningful way.

Gloria Coates was born in 1933 in Wausau (Wisconsin, USA) and began composing and experimenting with overtones and clusters from an early age. Since 1969, Coates lived primarily in Europe. She has written numerous works including 17 symphonies, 10 string quartets, chamber music, solo and vocal music, musique concrète and the chamber opera Stolen Identity. Coates was also a poet and painter, with many of her paintings used as the artwork for her recordings.

Gloria Coates died on 19 August 2023 in Munich.