Dahl was born
Walter Ingolf Marcus in
Hamburg, Germany, to a
German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers,
Gert Marcus (1914–2008; a noted Swedish artist and sculptor, and a recipient of the
Prince Eugen Medal), and Holger, and one sister, Anna-Britta. In Hamburg, Dahl studied piano under
Edith Weiss-Mann, a harpsichordist, pianist, and a proponent of
early music. Dahl studied with
Philipp Jarnach at the
Hochschule für Musik Köln (1930–32). Dahl left Germany as the
Nazi Party was
coming to power and continued his studies at the
University of Zurich, along with
Volkmar Andreae and . Living with relatives and working at the
Zürich Opera for more than six years, he rose from an internship to the rank of assistant conductor. He served as a vocal coach and chorus master for the world premieres of
Alban Berg's
Lulu and
Paul Hindemith's
Mathis der Maler. He settled in Los Angeles and joined the community of expatriate musicians that included
Ernst Krenek,
Darius Milhaud,
Arnold Schoenberg,
Igor Stravinsky, and
Ernst Toch. He had a varied musical career as a solo pianist, keyboard performer (piano and harpsichord), accompanist, conductor, coach, composer, and critic. He produced a performing translation of Schoenberg's
Pierrot lunaire in English and translated, either alone or with a collaborator, such works as Stravinsky's
Poetics of Music. He performed many of Stravinsky's works and the composer was impressed enough to contract Dahl to create a two-piano version of his
Danses concertantes and program notes for other works. In 1947, with
Joseph Szigeti he produced a reconstruction of Bach's Violin Concerto in D minor. He also worked in the entertainment industry, touring as pianist to
Edgar Bergen and his puppets in 1941 and later for comedian
Gracie Fields in 1942 and 1956. He produced musical arrangements for
Tommy Dorsey and served as arranger/conductor to
Victor Borge. He gave private lessons in the classical repertoire to
Benny Goodman as well. He performed on keyboard instruments in the soundtrack orchestras for many films at Fox,
Goldwyn Studios,
Columbia,
Universal,
MGM, and
Warner Bros., as well as the post-production company
Todd-AO. He also worked on the television show
The Twilight Zone. Though grateful for the income this work provided, he complained while working on
Spartacus how pointless it was "to tinkle a few notes on the celeste" when the notes are also doubled by several other instruments, all for a passage presented to the audience under sound effects and actors' voices. Dahl conducted the soundtrack to
The Abductors (1957) by his pupil
Paul Glass and performed both second and third movements of
Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata in the 1969 animated film
A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Among his compositions, the most frequently performed is the Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Orchestra commissioned and premiered by
Sigurd Raschèr in 1949. The piece went through several major revisions and re-scorings during Dahl's lifetime, but the original version was restored by
Paul Cohen and recorded in 2021. Dahl later completed commissions for the
Los Angeles Philharmonic and the
Koussevitzky and
Fromm foundations. His final work, complete and partly
orchestrated at his death in 1970, was the
Elegy Concerto for violin and chamber orchestra. In 1999, one critic reviewing a recording of Dahl's works called him a "spiffy composer", "a cross between Stravinsky and Hindemith". He legally changed his name to Ingolf Dahl in February 1943 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September of that year. In 1945 he joined the faculty of the
University of Southern California Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, where he taught for the rest of his life. In 1952 he was appointed the first head of the
Tanglewood Study Group, a program that targeted not professionals but "the intelligent amateur and music enthusiast, also the general music student and music educator". His most prominent students included the conductor
Michael Tilson Thomas and the composers
Harold Budd and
David Cope. In 1957 he co-directed the
Ojai Music Festival in partnership with
Aaron Copland and served as its music director from 1964 to 1966. Among Dahl's honors were a
Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 1951, two Huntington Hartford Fellowships, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Southern California, the
ASCAP Stravinsky Award, and a grant from the
National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954. He died in
Frutigen, Switzerland, on August 6, 1970, just a few weeks after the death of his wife on June 10. ==Personal life==