Category: Ledes

Daniel Steiner Photo by Paul Foley

Daniel Steiner was recently named President of the New England Conservatory of Music by Board Chairman David W. Scudder. Steiner has been serving as Acting President since July 1999.

The appointment concludes a year-long search by a Presidential Search Committee and follows its recommendation. “In little less than a year, Daniel Steiner has shown himself to be a leader of rare and exceptional strengths,” said Scudder. “He has been able to bring a strong sense of focus on key priorities of the Conservatory. His leadership abilities will enable the Conservatory to chart a well-planned and enthusiastic course for the future.”

Faculty Senate President Robert Paul Sullivan commented, “…a wise and skillful administrator, Daniel Steiner will provide the decisive leadership NEC needs at the beginning of the 21st century.”

When asked about his role in promoting new American music, Steiner commented to NewMusicBox: “As an American conservatory, we have an on-going and active responsibility to encourage American composers and to help bring about the performance of their works. Our renewed relationship with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project is an example of how we carry out that responsibility. We also have, of course, an active composition department that fosters the careers of American composers and the performance of their compositions.”

Prior to joining NEC as Acting President in July 1999, Daniel Steiner’s career as a lawyer had focused on higher education. He taught at the Kennedy School of Government from 1993 to 1996 and was General Counsel and then Vice President and General Counsel at Harvard University from 1970 to 1992. While at Harvard, Mr. Steiner was responsible for all the University’s legal affairs and assumed management responsibilities at various times for the security, human resources, real estate and international departments.

He is the author of several articles on individual and institutional ethics; he co-chaired the American Medical Association Task Force on Association/Corporation Relations in 1997-98.

An active supporter of Boston‘s cultural life, he chairs the Boards of Boston Baroque, Mind/Body Medical Institute, and Harvard Magazine and is a director of WGBH, Cambridge Community Foundation, Cambridge Trust Company and New England Conservatory.

At New England Conservatory, as an Overseer since 1994 and Trustee since 1995, Steiner served on and chaired many board committees, including the Admissions and Financial Aid Visiting Committee and the Faculty Development Committee, before becoming Acting President in 1999.

Recognized nationally and internationally as a leader among music schools, New England Conservatory, the only music school in America to be designated a National Historic Landmark, was founded in 1867. New England Conservatory presents more than 600 free concerts each year in NEC’s Jordan Hall and throughout New England. The college program instructs more than 775 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral music students from around the world, and has a faculty of 225 artist-teachers and scholars.

Through its Preparatory School, School of Continuing Education, and Community Collaboration Programs for pre-college students, adults, and elders, NEC offers a complete music curriculum. Educated as complete musicians, NEC alumni fill orchestra chairs, concert hall stages, jazz clubs, and recording studios worldwide. Nearly half of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is composed of NEC faculty and alumni.

Tom and Arnold Broido Photo courtesy of Theodore Presser Co.

The Theodore Presser Company recently gave a glimpse of what music publishing in the 21st century will look like. By teaming up with a CD-ROM company called CD Sheet Music, the company recently began publishing sheet music as PDF files on CD-ROM disks. This means that thousands of pages of sheet music can fit onto one CD-ROM.

The first 15 CD-ROMs to be released include the complete solo piano music of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, and Schumann, as well as “The Ultimate Collection of Piano Studies and Exercise” which includes exercises by Berens, Burgmuller, Czerny , Gurlitt, Heller, Kohler, Pischna, and others.

Most of the CDs cost $15 dollars each and include Adobe Acrobat software that enables users to view the sheet music on their computer screens and print it out on 8.5″ x 11″ paper. Users are also allowed to print unlimited copies of the music.

Currently the CDs contain only scans of the sheet music, although future releases may include opera and possibly other CDs with MIDI accompaniment files. By the end of 2002 the company plans to sell a series of 110 discs.

More probably than any component of NewMusicBox, SoundTracks inevitably reflects the diversity and ultimately uncategorizability of the music being created by American composers. Whereas each issue of NewMusicBox looks at a specific, albeit different, aspect of American music, SoundTracks always aims to be a reflection of what is being released on CD right now without any specific editorial guidelines other than that it is music by American composers that is submitted to us for our inclusion on the site.

This month we feature two very different new operas. William Mayer’s A Death in the Family, based on a novel by James Agee, was staged in December 1999 at the Manhattan School of Music. Steve Mackey’s Ravenshead, a one-man tour-de-force starring Rinde Eckert (who also wrote the libretto) was staged across the street at Columbia University, but they are worlds apart. Likewise, very different sound worlds are communicated in the symphonies by the late Samuel Barber and Irwin Bazelon, and the recent string symphony of Libby Larsen or the Concerto Per Corde by Christopher Rouse, also for string orchestra. A series of solo piano discs released this past month is also full of surprises, whether its Scott Kirby‘s latest survey of Terra Verde (new ragtime) or Anthony DeMare‘s homage to three of America’s greatest maverick composers, a survey of piano works by David Kraehenbuehl or a collection of 20th century piano works performed by Gloria Cheng.

The variety of approaches to the voice is reflected in new discs featuring John Kennedy‘s haunting music for countertenor, Michael Torke‘s brilliant renditions of the Book of Proverbs as well as a collection of songs by the early American composer John Alden Carpenter, Diane Hubka‘s post-Shiela Jordan jazz vocals and Djola Branner‘s tribute to gender-bending soul star Sylvester.

There are staggering number of chamber music releases this month, from discs dedicated to works by James Newton, Harold Farberman, William Bolcom, David MacBride, John Cage, and Donald Grantham to two collections featuring flute works by David Leisner, Aaron Copland and Arthur Foote. While Leon Lee Dorsey‘s new quartet disc is clearly within the realm of straight-ahead jazz, Wadada Leo Smith‘s all-star quartet with Anthony Davis, Malachi Favors and Jack DeJohnette builds on the 40 year tradition of free jazz experimentation, and the latest release by PRISM, a saxophone quartet who blur the lines between jazz and contemporary classical music, adds a variety of guest musicians into the mix. Another disc that blurs the lines between composition and improvisation features music by Graham Reynolds played alternately by the Golden Arm Trio and the Tosca String Quartet. And Maya Beiser‘s latest CD, featuring cello compositions based on gamelan, Middle Eastern music and Cambodian traditional music blurs geographical as well as stylistic boundaries.

Audiochrome, the latest disc by Larry Kucharz, blurs the line between contemporary composition and techno music while new discs by Neil Haverstick and Erik Hoversten, both of whom have contributed to this month’s Hymn & Fuguing Tune, lie somewhere in between the realms of new experimental music and alternative rock.

Alan Hovhaness Photo courtesy of C.F. Peters

Alan Hovhaness, a prolific composer who melded Western and Asian musical genres, died in Seattle on June 21, 2000. He was 89 and had suffered from a severe stomach ailment for the last three years.

Hovhaness was born in Somerville, MA, on March 8, 1911 to Haroutiun Hovhaness Chakmakjian, a chemistry professor, and Madeline Scott Chakmakjian. His Scottish mother thought her husband’s Armenian last name sounded too foreign for a young child growing up in a suburb of Boston, so she changed his name to Alan Hovhaness when he was still quite young. Hovhaness began improvising even before he had piano lessons, and began writing music as soon as he learned to read it at the age of seven. By age 13, Hovhaness had already written two operas, Bluebeard and Daniel, as well as a number of smaller works. His early piano teachers were Adelaide Proctor and Heinrich Gebhard, and his first composition studies were with Frederick Converse at the New England Conservatory of Music (following a brief period at Tufts).

The pivotal moment in Hovhaness’ development as a composer was in 1942, when he won a scholarship to study at Tanglewood. It was there, in Bohuslav Martinu‘s master class, that Hovhaness was first exposed to Eastern music. He subsequently worked with priests of the Armenian church and Eastern Troubadours who still sang the pure intervals of their ancient music. This precipitated for him a new way of creating melodic lines which were free from equal temperament in pure modes. As he wrote in the Music Clubs Magazine of February 1965: “To me the hundreds of scales and ragas possible in Eastern musical systems afford both disciplines and stimuli for a great expansion of new melodic creations. I am more interested in creating fresh, spontaneous, singing melodic lines than in the factory-made tonal patterns of industrial civilization or the splotches and spots of sound hurled at random on a canvas of imaginary silence. I am bored with mechanically constructed music and I am also bored with the mechanical revolution against such music. I have found no joy in either and have found freedom only within the sublime disciplines of the East.”

In 1948 Hovhaness joined the faculty of the Boston Conservatory of Music. He left this post in 1951 to move to New York in order to pursue composition full time. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar in India from 1959-1960, during which time he was invited to participate in the annual Music Festival of the Academy of Music in Madras. He was also commissioned by All India Radio to write a work for an orchestra comprised entirely of Japanese instruments, which he called Nagooran. He served for six months as composer-in-residence at the University of Hawaii and became a composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony in 1966.

He was presented with the National Arts and Letters Award, twice with the Guggenheim Fellowship, and twice with an honorary doctorate in music (from the University of Rochester and Bates College). In a note submitted with a biographical survey to the American Music Center in 1949, however, Hovhaness wrote, “No important awards–see list of works–It is best that no mention be made of my scholarship or education because my direction is completely away from the approved path of any of my teachers–thus the responsibility will be inflicted on no one but myself.” The tonality of Eastern music, particularly Armenian and Indian music, was especially influential in his development.

In an article in the Musical Quarterly of July 1951, Henry Cowell wrote, “Western composers who go back to pre-16th century styles deliberately avoid any air of modernity, and call themselves ‘neo-classical.’ Their music often sounds inhibited, for their attitude represents an extreme of conservatism. Hovhaness’ music…sounds modern (but not ultra-modern) in a natural and uninhibited fashion, because he has found new ways to use the archaic materials with which he starts, by following their natural trend towards modal sequence and polymodalism. His innovations do not break with early traditions. His is moving, long-breathed music, splendidly written and unique in style. It is contemporary development of the archaic spirit and sounds like the music of nobody else at all.”

Program notes from a performance by pianist Joel Salsman in honor of Hovhaness’ eightieth birthday vividly describe the process by which Hovhaness composed: “He writes every night, getting more and more creative as the night goes on. By dawn he is wildly creative; composing in a sweep, he leaves corrections and revisions until later. Quite often the entire score complete with orchestration comes at one time. His total output of compositions is impressive, even more so when one hears that he has destroyed whole periods of work.” In 1940, Hovhaness burned over a thousand of his works, including several operas and two symphonies, saying that he had not been critical enough when writing them. His total surviving output includes more than 400 pieces, including at least nine operas, two ballets, more than 60 symphonies, and more than 100 chamber pieces. Among his best-known works are And God Created the Great Whales (a music-dance drama), Mysterious Mountain (Symphony No. 2), the Mount Saint Helens Symphony (Symphony No. 50), and the Easter Cantata.

See Alan Hovhaness’ submission to the AMC Biographical Survey from 1949

click here for larger version

click here for larger version

It is perhaps poetic justice that concurrent with our issue inspired by the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Music that Bridge Records has released the world premiere recording of the Pulitzer winner from 1999, Melinda Wagner’s Flute Concerto. There are a number of other Pulitzer alumni among the featured composers this month: Howard Hanson (Winner of the 1948 Pulitzer), represented here by his little-known solo piano music; Mario Davidovsky (Winner of the 1971 Pulitzer), represented with a retrospective disc featuring mostly works of the past decade; Ned Rorem (Winner of the 1976 Pulitzer), who is included on a disc of recent choral music; and Samuel Barber (two-time winner), who is one of 11 composers featured on a recital disc dedicated to art songs based on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And they’re not the only winners represented here. Michael John LaChiusa’s Marie Christine has been nominated for a Tony Award for Best Original Musical Score. And, three-time Academy Award-winning composer Miklós Rózsa is represented by a disc of his should-have-received-major-awards-but-didn’t concertos. (Another disc this month features concert works by five American film composers.)

Many of the great names in American music who made it into our “Why Didn’t They Ever Win A Pulitzer?” Hall of Fame are here as well: Otto Luening, with a beautifully-packaged collection of his art songs; Earle Brown, with a remarkable re-issue of some of his early masterpieces; Morton Feldman, with a complete collection of his music for violin and piano featuring the bizarre For John Cage (one of his rare forays into microtonality); George Antheil, with yet another recording of his until-this-year long unavailable symphonies; Ruth Crawford Seeger, with a brilliantly-performed set of chamber works; and John Adams, with a new recording of his violin concerto. Philip Glass’s violin concerto is featured in two separate recordings this month: the first paired with the Adams, the other on an all-Glass Naxos disc (pretty amazing, huh) featuring some mysterious booklet notes. There’s even a new all-Glass CD on Nonesuch featuring the long awaited Symphony No. 3 which I’m thrilled to finally hear in not-bootleg-quality fidelity!

There are also three discs of free improvisation featuring Joel Futterman (provocatively-titled Authenticity, Relativity, and Revelation), and a new disc of orchestral music by Victor Herbert, as well as discs featuring big band compositions by Sam Rivers, vocal music by Daniel Asia, solo piano music by Carson Kievmann and another disc featuring solo piano works by seven different composers, small combo jazz recordings by Hal Gamper and Ravi Coltrane, a disc of chamber music by Richard Wilson, and a disc of chamber works by four SCI member-composers that blurs the boundaries between classical chamber music and jazz.

Just when you thought you heard it all before, there’s always something startlingly new that lands on the desk and this month is no different. Jay Cloidt‘s collection of altered cat and baby sounds and disco-savvy string quartet is a good way to lighten up a potentially cynical morning. Sampler pioneer Barton McLean‘s Happy Days, included on a new collection of his electronic works on CRI, is also guaranteed to brighten up the room. A re-issue collecting works by Edwin London features some really surprising extended vocal writing and two new discs devoted to works by members of the Bang On A Can all-stars take the notion of totalism ever further than the term normally implies. The music of Nick Didkovsky combines the sonic universes of post-Bitches Brew electric free jazz and the post-modernist string quartet. And Evan Ziporyn combines progressive rock and Balinese gamelan.

Gideon Waldrop, circa 1961 Photo by Helen Merrill, courtesy Boosey & Hawkes

Gideon Waldrop, a composer and administrator, who served as dean of the Juilliard School of Music for 24 years and was president of the Manhattan School of Music for nearly three years, died on May 19 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.

Waldrop was born on September 12, 1919 near Abilene, Texas. After receiving a Bachelor of Music degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he went on to Eastman, where he received a Ph. D. in Composition in 1952. During World War II he served in the intelligence division of the Air Force during World War II, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star.

His involvement in the administrative field began in the 1950’s when he was editor of the Review of Recorded Music as well as the Musical Courier. He also served as a music consultant to the Ford Foundation. In 1960 he became the assistant to the president of Juilliard and was appointed dean the next year. During his tenure at Juilliard, the school moved from its old building on Claremont Avenue in Morningside Heights into its new $30 million building at Lincoln Center.

Waldrop with Leontyne Price, photo courtesy Boosey & Hawkes

Mr. Waldrop served as acting president of Juilliard in 1983, following the death of the school’s president Peter Mennin.

From 1986 until 1989, Waldrop was president of the Manhattan School of Music, which had taken over the old Juilliard building on Claremont Avenue. He resigned this post over disagreements with the board.

Waldrop’s orchestral compositions include a symphony (1952) and the suite From the Southwest (1964); he also wrote chamber works, choral pieces, and songs.

As usual, the 34 CDs collected in this month’s round-up of new recordings of American repertoire reflect a stunning range of musical possibilities. A great amount of lost American musical history has been unearthed recently in recordings of symphonies by Virgil Thomson, George Antheil, and Paul Creston, organ concertos by Leo Sowerby, chamber music by Arthur Foote, and songs by Edward MacDowell, as well as an Ellipsis Arts collection of early electronic music featuring works by 30 American composers. (The music of one important composer overlooked by Ellipsis Arts, Gordon Mumma, is luckily featured on a career retrospective disc by Lovely Music.)

New discs featuring original orchestral works by Ferde Grofé and Robert Russell Bennett, today more often remembered for the orchestrations of music by Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, shed new light on their achievements, and a 2-CD collection of John Cage’s text pieces offers an intimate side to Cage that most people who did not know him personally are unaware of, while a new disc of his orchestral work is further proof of the inexhaustible treasure trove that is the Cage archive.

A variety of new piano discs display an exiting array of approaches which range from Peter Serkin’s lyrical approach to complex modernist scores to Paul Bley‘s lyrical approach to the often equally complex sound world of free jazz. Somewhere in between those two worlds are Elie Siegmeister’s jazz-tinged contributions to modern piano music, collected on 2 new CDs (volume 1 and volume 2), Stephen M. Barnett’s post-impressionistic counterpoint, Ernesto Diaz-Infante’s Feldman meets Monk improvisations and the uncategorizable work of Keith Jarrett, two very different facets of which are represented here this month: his very personal solo piano interpretations of standards and his compositions for other players. And then there’s a disc of rediscovered early works and fragments for player piano by Conlon Nancarrow, and a collection of new music for 2 pianos features an amazing quartertone piece by John Corigliano.

Old and new jazz sounds emanate from a big-band performance by the great Buddy Collette, the first-ever jazz disc on Bridge Records, as well as small group recordings by John Abercrombie, the Dave Holland Quintet, Sarah Jane Cion, and the genre’s boundaries continue to get stretched with new discs by Neil Sadler and Andy Narell who solos on steel drums!

Jazz isn’t the only music whose boundaries get stretched this month. A new disc by the Kronos Quartet, featuring a new piece by Terry Riley as well as arrangements by Osvaldo Golijov, continues the globe-trotting sonic explorations of their landmark Pieces of Africa disc, and Bill Frisell’s new solo disc is a unique amalgamation of jazz, country, blues and several other things…

New discs of chamber music by Elliott Schwartz, Alan Hovhaness, and Steve Reich as well as large scale choral work by Frank Ferko offer great listening rewards as well, so give some of these discs a listen!

This month’s edition of SoundTracks spans a greater chronology that ever before. Perhaps it’s fitting that in the end of the first year of NewMusicBox, there would be so wide a range. Now that we’re in the 21st Century (pace to the 2001 apostates), of course, it is now possible to have recordings of American music from 4 different centuries, and this time, indeed we do!

From the 18th century, we’ve got music by David Moritz Michael (1751-1827), a German composer who lived and worked in the United States from 1795 to 1815, contributing greatly to early Pennsylvanian musical life both through his work for the Moravian Church and through composing and conducting secular instrumental music. From the 19th century, we’ve got a wonderful new recording of the Piano Concerto and Piano Quintet of Amy Beach performed by the dynamic pianist Joanne Polk who has previously recorded Beach’s complete solo piano music. A few of Beach’s delightful songs appear on a new CD by soprano Carolyn Heafner which also features repertoire by five other composers including Ernst Bacon, who, though largely forgotten, was one of our most important song composers.

As for the 20th century, the choices are as seemingly endless as always. Last month we asked you to name the most important 20th century American composer, one of our easier questions :), and it almost feels like the record companies were listening! Of course, it takes much more that a month to get a CD into production, but it’s a joyous coincidence that the music of five of your choices for most important composer – John Cage, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Duke Ellington, Milton Babbitt and Conlon Nancarrow – all appear on new recordings this month. (Some other possible candidates for most important 20th century composer, who somehow didn’t make it onto our forum yet, resurface again this month in new recordings as well: Henry Cowell, Samuel Barber…) In fact, Griffes appears three times: his complete piano music has been released on two separate discs (disc 1 | disc 2) and his lovely Poem for Flute and Orchestra appears on a collection of flute concertos which also features a little-known concerto by Virgil Thomson. Cage appears twice, first on a new disc devoted to his visceral early percussion music and second on yet another recording of the seemingly-ubiquitous Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, albeit this time with a twist… It’s on Naxos. Cage has finally become standard repertoire after all!

Naxos’s American Classics series continues to offer up other surprises as well: symphonies by Meredith Willson whom I’ve previously only known through The Music Man and other inventive Broadway musicals. There’s even a new Naxos disc featuring the music of a living American composer who is still in his 20s, Carter Pann! A new disc of works written in the last few years for duo violinists János Négyesy and Päivikki Nykter features music by two other composers still in their 20s. Of course, the lion’s share of releases devoted to the music of contemporary American composers is still CRI, a label that continually amazes both with a startling number of new releases as well as historic back-catalog re-issues. This month’s new releases include discs devoted to the music of Jennifer Margaret Barker, Ronald Caltabiano and Herman Berlinski, who turns 90 in August and is still going strong! Even this is trumped by another CRI release, a re-issue of music by Minnesota elder statesman Gene Gutchë who turns 93 in July. The title curiosity level of his “Bongo Divertimento” is only outdone by “Fanfare, Fugue and Funk” featured on another CRI re-issue devoted to the music of Francis Thorne! There are a whole host of other discs devoted to the music of both elder statesmen and younger lions (to borrow the term from the neo-Hard Boppers) including David Diamond, Easley Blackwood, Dominick Argento, Judith Lang Zaimont, Richard Wilson, José Serebrier, Daniel Asia and Ian Krouse.

This month, in the less-than-easily-classifiable department (which is always proof of how varied new American music is) are film scores by Caleb Sampson and the Alloy Orchestra, who’ve used three classic silent films as the departure point for some very unusual music. A new disc by guitarist/composer Tom Taylor merges bluegrass, jazz, rock and classical fugues into a cohesive whole with some help from Dave Grisman and the Kronos Quartet. There are even more elements thrown into the mix on the second Tin Hat Trio album and on the first full length CD from Twisted Tutu, a new music-and-beyond duo whom Kyle Gann, in his provocative liner notes, describes “as the way 21st century music sounds.”

Of course, it’s still a little misleading to talk of releases featuring 21st century music. Chances are, this early on, that even discs that say © 2000 everywhere and offer no other date, such as Steve Heitzeg‘s eclectic music for the PBS documentary Death of a Dream, were at least partially if not completely conceived and recorded sometime before December 31, 1999. But who knows? And, indeed if it has not been disseminated into the world until now, isn’t it 21st Century Music anyway? And if you haven’t heard any of this music before, what then? So much for clocks! Maybe it’s best to turn them off for a while and listen to some of this music…

William Colvig with Lou Harrison and John Luther Adams Photo by Dennis Keeley

Musician and instrument builder, engineer and mountaineer William Colvig died on March 1, 2000 in Capitola California, at the age of 82.

Born in Medford, Oregon on March 13, 1917, Bill grew up in Weed, California at the base of Mt. Shasta where he developed his lifelong passion for the mountains and learned to play several musical instruments. At the College (now University) of the Pacific and the University of California Berkeley, he studied both music and electrical engineering. He later combined his musical and technical talents, designing and building with composer Lou Harrison the first complete American Gamelan. Over the years, Colvig and Harrison built many other instruments based on models from around the world, tuned in just intonation and other acoustically-perfect tunings.

In addition to being musical collaborators, Bill and Lou were life partners. At a time when gay couples were still largely invisible to the straight world, they openly and tenderly showed their profound love for one another. Their thirty-three years of shared life and devotion is a model and an inspiration for all couples.

Over the years, as their flowing beards and hair turned white, Lou and Bill grew to resemble one another more and more. But Bill’s lithe frame, the spring in his step and the twinkle in his eye also gave him a more than passing resemblance to John Muir. Like Muir, Bill was an ardent advocate for wilderness, who passionately loved the Sierra Nevada and led many trips into the Range of Light for the Sierra Club (founded by Muir). As he wanted it, Bill’s ashes will be scattered among those rugged mountains.

Along with Lou, Bill always warmly welcomed younger composers and musicians into the beautiful home they shared overlooking the Pacific. Over the years, Lou and Bill hosted me for several memorable visits. In 1988, I had the great pleasure of welcoming them to Alaska, for a residency and concert with the Fairbanks Symphony. This was Lou’s first visit to Alaska. But it was homecoming for Bill. In the late 30’s he had left Berkeley to live for several years on the rough and ready frontier of Alaska and the Yukon, and he was thrilled to be back in the North again.

William with Gamelan Photo by Dennis Keeley

For their concert, Lou and Bill brought with them the Sundanese gamelan degung, Sekar Kembar. As far as we can tell, this was the first time a gamelan had been heard “live” in Alaska. Bill played various instruments in the ensemble, and he was featured as soloist playing the suling flute in Lou’s tunefully-sunny Main Bersama-sama for horn, suling and gamelan.

After the concert, Lou and Bill came out to my cabin for a party. My place was deep in the woods. I had no running water and heated with a wood stove. The temperature in the boreal forest that night was well into the forty-somethings below zero. Accustomed to warmer climes, Lou was good-humored in his forbearance. But Bill was in his element. The colder it got, the better he liked it. The aurora borealis dancing in the sky that night was the icing on his cake.

Bill Colvig was one of a kind — a true original’s original. His impish grin and mischievous laugh, his irrepressible enthusiasm and unbridled joy in living will remain always in the hearts of everyone who knew him. The beautiful instruments and the rich life he created with Lou Harrison will be his enduring musical legacy to the world.

When Bill’s spirit left his body, Lou was at his side, holding his hand. “It was a peaceful death”, says his soul-mate. “He was so beautiful. Like a beautiful animal returning to Nature.”