Category: Memorials

Remembering Seymour Barab (1921-2014): Composer, Cellist, Friend

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Anahid Ajemian - Headlines, Memorials

[Ed Note: Seymour Barab, one of the most prolific composers of operas and music for young audiences as well as a formidable cellist dedicated to the performance of new music, died on June 28, 2014 at the age of 93. To honor his memory, we asked violinist Anahid Ajemian—who knew Barab for more than half a century and who, along with him, Matthew Raimondi, and Bernard Zaslav were the founding members of the Composers Quartet formed in 1963—to share her recollections of Barab as composer, cellist, and friend. We’d like to thank George Boziwick, Chief of the Music Division for The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, as well as Ajemian’s son Greg Avakian, for helping to coordinate this essay, and also Barab’s daughter-in-law Marie McCann, who supplied us with the historic photos reproduced herein—FJO]

A young Seymour Barab playing the cello

Seymour Barab started composing at an early age, and his interest in new music and composition remained a major part of his life. It was many years before I became aware of the number and variety of his compositions because I later knew Seymour as a fellow musician in the Composers String Quartet.

I probably met Seymour in New York City sometime in the mid 1940s. Even then, Seymour made quite an impression as he walked into a room—a large, cheerful man swinging his cello at the end of his arm. At this time composers were eager and even anxious to have readings and performances of their music, and Seymour was already writing, performing, and organizing new music events.

It was another era.

In 1946 my sister, pianist Maro Ajemian, and I were touring in Europe. We played in Paris where we also spent some time attending concerts and gatherings. During an informal afternoon reading of a movement of what could have been a segment from Boulez’s first piano sonata, I recognized Seymour Barab among the many musicians there from New York. He had taken a year after being discharged from the navy to work and compose in Paris. I later found out that during this year he composed over 200 instrumental and vocal works.

Upon returning to the United States, Seymour immediately became very busy in New York doing various recording projects, concerts, and of course composing. The number of contemporary concerts at an increasing number of venues led to a cadre of younger performers who were eager to learn and play these challenging works. Seymour was immensely popular due to his confidence in performing, as well as his interest in, and rapid understanding of, these complicated scores.

In the 1950s as television and radio commercials became more common, Seymour was very much in demand and we would occasionally meet in the studios. This is when I first began to know Seymour as a friend and not just as a colleague. I sensed the kindness of the gentle soul that he was. He quickly deciphered any music that was placed before him, but he was also respectful—both as a musician and as a human being.

Barab playing cello with ben Weber standing in back

Barab reading through a score by Ben Weber, who is standing behind him.

During this period, the composer Gunther Schuller selected the best available musicians in the city for concerts of new works. These concerts were a terrific success. Gunther asked Matthew Raimondi to organize a quartet to perform three concerts of contemporary new works. Matthew asked me, and then quickly chose Seymour and Bernie Zaslav as other members. We were an ad hoc group—all with careers and obligations to other ensembles—and didn’t know what might be the outcome of this exciting endeavor. The results were numerous requests from universities, and composers suddenly had need for a permanent quartet. This is how we formed The Composers String Quartet in 1965.

As a musician, Seymour was remarkable to work with. As would be expected, his playing was brilliant, but as a member of the quartet, he was an asset beyond his ability to play his instrument. Seymour could articulate and explain the structural intent of a given piece of music, and his playing was void of vanity.

Seymour had a sense of the musical purpose of a composition. Some composers start work by using ideas and elements of music as building blocks and then create an intellectual structure of music that is emotional and beautiful nonetheless; others are inspired by an emotional image, sense, or feeling that must be expressed. Seymour had an uncanny ability to read the music and interpret the composer’s process and intended emotional content—and thus play the music from the composer’s point of view and not just by reading the notes on a page.

For Seymour, working with three other people who all had a passion for music seemed easy; he was intelligent and articulate, but he never used this to get his way or challenge the other members of the group. He did not dictate his desires as much as put them forth for our consideration. Seymour would join his ideas to others so that we never spent much time discussing musical interpretation. We played together and if something was said, Seymour would add to it, often showcasing a brilliant aspect of the music that perhaps we hadn’t heard before. But more than anything, Seymour’s ability to articulate different ideas through his playing helped us to converse through music and not just talk.

As the quartet grew in popularity, it became evident that travel and touring would move beyond the concerts we were regularly performing in the United States. At this point, Seymour was justifiably feeling the time constraints in his work as a composer.
After a long rehearsal one day, Seymour invited Matthew and me out for a drink. Seymour told us that he loved to play with us, but he was uncomfortable with the travel and time it took away from his composing. We had known that this was on his mind for some time and decided to accommodate schedules until we solved the problem. Because Seymour was Seymour, our friendship never ended.

Seymour finished his time with the Composers String Quartet by playing several concerts and was on several recordings. My favorite is of Carter’s First String Quartet when Seymour starts that solo entrance; it’s perfect.
Seymour, we will all miss you.

A collection of family photos of Seymour Barab assembled by the Barab family.
Accompanying music: Dances for Oboe and Strings by Seymour Barab,
performed by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra conducted by Richard Auldon Clark (Kleos Classics 5112)

Remembering Robert Ashley (1930-2014)

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Collaborators of Robert Ashley - Headlines, Memorials

Robert Ashley in 1985 during the Chicago performances of Atalanta (Acts of God). (All photos herein courtesy Jacqueline Humbert unless otherwise noted.)

By now most readers will have already heard the sad news of the passing of composer Robert Ashley on Monday, March 3, 2014. There have been numerous obituaries from around the world which have offered extremely eloquent tributes to his enormous contribution to American music and, in particular, to contemporary opera. Since Ashley’s work was by design extremely collaborative, we wanted to honor his memory on NewMusicBox by having his key collaborators—each of whom are important creators in their own right—share their personal stories about working with him over the decades.—FJO

Joan La Barbara
Thomas Buckner
Jacqueline Humbert
Tom Hamilton
“Blue” Gene Tyranny
Sam Ashley
Melody Sumner Carnahan
Dave Ruder
Alvin Lucier

From a performance of Celestial Excursions in Germany, 2004: (left to right) Robert Ashley, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, Sam Ashley, and Thomas Buckner.

Joan La Barbara
To begin at the beginning, I first worked with Robert Ashley in 1974 at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, a wonderful structure and, as I recall, round. The Sonic Arts Union had been invited by Festival d’Automne, and David Behrman and Alvin Lucier had each conceived new vocal pieces for me. David’s was Voice with Melody-Driven Electronics and Alvin’s, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas. Bob decided to have me play solo viola, which lay in my lap; I dragged the bow over a string very slowly making non-pitched ticks that were fed to a complex electronic gating system which allowed a story Mimi Johnson was telling to be heard by the audience (or not) depending on whether the gates were opened or closed. I didn’t quite understand how the gating worked but as I listened to Mimi, I realized that she was relating a story about us and was getting to a part that I wasn’t sure I’d like revealed in public, so I managed to get those gates closed. It was a good time to be in Paris.
I interviewed Bob for the SoHo Weekly News, a publication that was left free on SoHo doorsteps in the ‘70s. (Ah, those were the days…) I had decided to write preview articles because I was appalled that my fellow composers were being reviewed so badly (if at all) and that perhaps by providing some insight into the work in advance, they’d get a better chance at being understood by critics as well as the audience (especially since some eschewed program notes altogether). Bob and I spoke about the “internal dialogue” as he called it, the “conversation” that one has with oneself before allowing words to leave the mind and take up their existence in the outside world. It was a concept that fascinated me, affecting a lot of my work and one piece in particular, Performance Piece, which I subtitled Ashley gave me an idea, dealing with the process of thought involved in real-time composition (sometimes referred to as “improvisation”) and requiring that in performance when I was thinking in “pure” sound, i.e. music, I would reveal that but when I started analyzing, as we often do when composing in real-time, I had to let the words flow out. It is more difficult than it sounds, involving crashing the barrier between left and right brain activities.
Bob’s clarity of thought in conversation was astounding, delving deeply into process as well as profoundly exposing personal experience.

The operas reflected his view of the world, taking his own stories and blending them with historical fact, fiction, and fantasy to build complex interwoven tales that required several hearings to fathom (if then). During pre-rehearsal periods, the individual singers would discuss the nature of their characters with Bob, learning only somewhat later how he had constructed each one based on his perception of some aspect of the singer’s own personality and persona layered into the texture. He gave us each tonal centers onto which we imparted our own take on the story, the message, and how the person we were playing might inflect it, based on background, circumstance, upbringing, status, life history. And yes, there were the “songs” that we each, as all good singers do, made our own. But the words, the tonality, the chord structures, the underpinning, the music, were all Bob. (Though we did grouse a bit from time to time about not being given more direct instruction, we did get direction, correction, and encouragement to go further with each interpretation.)

If I had to pick one opera as a favorite, I guess I’d choose Dust. It is direct and clear in its political message—that old men wage wars and young men fight them (now young women, too, but the Korean war, which Dust was about, more or less, was fought by young men—except for the nurses, doctors, drivers—but I digress). It has songs that can be sung and remembered. It wears its heart on its sleeve, the way Bob often did; it was raw, revelatory, insightful, direct, and confrontational, with a few obscenities thrown in for emphasis. The characters were larger-than-life in-your-face tell-it-like-it-is, yet with that tinge of sadness, melancholy even, reflecting back as it drove home the truth inside the stories.

The production process was complex. Bob wrote and rewrote before the drafts were sent to the singers. The instructions were in the scores but the depth came in individual sessions when we discussed the characters and their pain, their joy, their world views. Then we each went our separate ways to work on how to let one’s voice reveal the inner truths, the opinions.

We worked several weeks in the recording studio at Mills College, creating the tracks for Improvement, learning to “ghost” each other’s vocal inflections and deliveries, adjusting to each other’s quirks and traits, subsuming one’s own personality into another’s to “get it right.” These were the work sessions that went into the CD tracks, that became the backing tracks, that were played back through in-ear monitors, that we then improved upon in live performance even as we had to keep matching what we had already done. Not easy, these tasks.

Layers of complexity: verbal, sonic, vocal; intentionality hidden, lessons imparted. Bob was continually reshaping the performance, even moments before we walked onstage. “Do it faster” or “Lay back, don’t push.” Process that as you exit the wings. The “Notes” came before, rarely after each performance. Not to throw us off balance but to up the ante, sharpen the awareness, rip the rug out so we wouldn’t become too secure or settled in any one interpretation or delivery.

Now Eleanor’s Idea had several versions, especially with the advice letters, as Now Eleanor (the name of the principal character) gradually receives the information, the “word”, the language, the passion. It goes beyond speaking in tongues to absorbing and processing the culture of The Other. Lessons learned, lives perfected, infinite repetitions until … now, no more.

Music with Roots in the Aether, the set of videos Bob conceived and directed on a select group of composers whose work he felt needed more explication, is a set of gems that have yet to be fully studied and appreciated. Each places the composer’s interview in a setting designed to reveal a central aspect of that person’s being. (He let the music speak for itself.)

How does one discuss years of knowing even over great distances? Years of exploring another composer’s process and ideas and way and means of notating or disseminating information will take years of reflection and more than a few words.

How do I process his loss? I am still coming to grips with it, looking back over the years and reflecting on lessons learned, stories told, funny experiences, as well as more than a bit of sorrow that there was not more time to do the work and do it even better the next time. There is a new generation of singers taking up the older works with their own interpretations, and taking up the new work, which we will experience soon at The Whitney and elsewhere.
Good-bye, Bob. You will be missed more than you could have known.

Mimi Johnson, Robert Ashley, Jacqueline Humbert, and Joan La Barbara in Vilnius, Lithuania in November 2004 for performances of Celestial Excursions.

Thomas Buckner
It is difficult to write about his work, so soon after the death of my dear friend and colleague, Robert Ashley. He was not only a wonderful composer and writer, but also a deeply compassionate man and a dear friend. I will take refuge in some history, and see where that leads.

In 1982, the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, based in Berkeley, California, which I founded and co-directed with composer/conductor/bassoonist Robert Hughes, received a consortium grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and got to choose a composer to commission. We chose Robert Ashley, whose work we had become familiar with partly due to the fact that he was director of Mills College’s Center for Contemporary Music (the world’s first public access electronic music studio, as far as we know). Robert Hughes said at the time, and I agreed, that Robert Ashley had “the most original mind in contemporary music.”

Little did I know at the time that that decision would lead to my spending the next thirty years working with Robert Ashley, during which time I had ample evidence of his originality as well as his unique understanding of the nature of speech as music. Bob had heard me perform in California, and so, instead of a piece of occasional music, he set the “Odalisque” arias, from his then current opera Atalanta (Acts of God), for baritone and chamber orchestra. He chose to write out the speech rhythms in musical notation since we would not be rehearsing the piece together. It was very complicated, a real challenge. I know from this experience how much more efficient and natural Bob’s alternative notation is for his work. I had just returned to my hometown of New York City after 20 years in California, so I didn’t yet have much work and had a lot of time. My roommate in New York was the great hand drummer Big Black, best known for his work with Dizzy Gillespie and Randy Weston. Black learned the rhythm of my part by ear, as he did not read music, and we performed it over and over until it was locked in. I went to Bob’s apartment, just across Canal Street from where I was living, and sang the part for Bob. Unbeknownst to me, this was the beginning of an audition. Bob came out to the performance in San Francisco, and afterwards asked me to sing in the next performance of Atalanta, which was to be in Rome in a couple of months. When he found out that I could sing in Italian, he had the Odalisque arias translated into Italian for the Rome performances, the first of which became the recording of the opera. It was a baptism by fire, singing with the great “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Bob’s tape part, made with the Golbranson Palice organ that he had also used in Perfect Lives.
Speaking Italian is much closer to singing than speaking English, so the “Odalisque” arias are fully sung in a recitative style, “spontaneous musical invention based on the natural declamation of the text,” as Bob called it. It was a perfect fit for me, as was the next piece Bob composed for me, My Brother Called, which combined composed melismatic singing on the syllable “oo” with spontaneously invented speech song based of the declamation of the text. We met several days a week to develop the style of that piece, which eventually became part of his opera eL/Aficionado. Whenever I perform a work of Bob’s, people always say he writes for my voice better than anyone else. He knew his singers’ strengths and weaknesses better than we do ourselves.

In all the many pieces he has composed over the years, Bob has never repeated himself, either musically or in his extraordinary texts. Yet his music always sounds like him. I know of no higher praise.

Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert (seated), Robert Ashley, and Sam Ashley in eL/Aficionado, Geneva 1994.

Jacqueline Humbert
It is difficult to express how significant an impact, how great an influence one life can have on another. I will make an attempt though it will be incomplete and inadequate.

I had known of Robert Ashley’s innovative music for years before beginning to work with him in 1980, first as a designer and subsequently as a performer. I admired his great intelligence and astonishing imagination. He was astoundingly prolific as well. Over the years he became a north star for me; an inspiration, a creative genius, and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.
It was both an honor and a pleasure to have worked with Robert for so many years. Through his many operas the ensemble toured internationally, were recorded and broadcast widely, and given the chance to perform the vivid characters Robert created, so varied from opera to opera. Robert was incredibly generous in providing the many opportunities to all who worked with him for so many years and we are all so very grateful and humbled by the experience.

Robert had it all; grace, charm, wit, and a voice like velvet or smoke, depending on the character. He is already sorely missed. The world has lost one of the truly great ones.

Jacqueline Humbert and Robert Ashley at a recording studio in the mid 1990s.

Tom Hamilton
Originally, Bob knew me as a composer who was fairly new to New York. One evening in 1990 he saw me at a concert and said, “Tom—what do you know about this Macintosh MIDI stuff?” I told him that I made my living as a freelance recording engineer. He said “Really, I didn’t know that” and took my card. The next day he followed up and invited me to his studio. (I thought I was there to fix a piece of equipment.) What he wanted was someone to work with him every day and finish the CD version of his new opera Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) for Nonesuch Records. The studio was pretty bare bones at that point and so we built it up to be able to create the electronic orchestra and do a multi-track mix. I had come from a traditional studio background—large tape machines and bulky gear in general. I discovered that Bob had that same background, though dating from even earlier origins. And like Bob, I also came from an electronic music background, working with the earliest analog synthesizers, developing an oblique approach to composing, and running a studio at a university. This was all very familiar territory.

Later in 1990, Bob got some gigs in Honolulu and Portland for a small grouping of his ensemble. He asked me to be part of the tour, which enlarged my role from just working in the studio to doing the mixes and audio processing on the live performances as well. The style for me was much less pre-planned than in the studio recordings, and Bob encouraged me to develop the mixes as improvisational performances. It felt like I was creating a fictitious sound world for the singers to live in.

In an important way, that first year that I worked with Bob set the tone for what became a quarter-century music lesson. Bob was very generous in sharing his knowledge and insights, and in the studio, when he’d say “let’s take a break,” it could mean a 10 minute concept discussion on something we might have heard the night before. Or I would ask him about something bothering me on one of my own pieces, and he would come up with just the right aphorism. “If you have a system—stick to it!” was something that he practiced daily. His cautionary “don’t make the ship too big to fly” saved more than one session from ending up in a cul-de-sac.

Much has been written about the colorful and insightful texts in Bob’s operas. In 2001 Bob did a reading at Black Oak Books in Berkeley in conjunction with a performance at Mills College. The person introducing him said that, “Ashley’s writing makes experts out of all of us.” There was always that quality in the air; he would write or say something and a beat later we would think, “Oh yeah.” Except that Bob thought of it first. It’s part of what made the experience of the tours so unique. That feeling that it was beyond just doing the work; it was stretching the brain into a new form.

The texts in Bob’s operas have kept his fans enthralled for decades. A prominent characteristic was a story being told in a style that created an ambiguity between pitch and narration. “Is it singing or is it speaking?” the critics would fret. Bob always called it singing. I never heard him describe it any other way. It forced a different idea of what music could be. Listening to any of the stories in Dust as performed by Bob, Sam Ashley, Tom Buckner, Jacquie Humbert, and Joan La Barbara, you can hear that dichotomy played out with much variety, depending on mood, style, and the individual character that was developed. Last year Bob recorded a long solo part to a forthcoming opera called Quicksand. There was always a reference pitch in his headphones. And how those vocal resonances and references would play out was still an unknown, as the orchestras hadn’t been developed beforehand.

Less has been said about the electronic musical structures in Bob’s work that I helped make in all of the operas since 1990. For each piece, we would work at least a year just on the electronic orchestras (and he always called them “orchestras” and organized them that way). He was very eager to learn more about MIDI and the operation of sequencing software. Even at a time when the popularity of the MIDI protocol started to fade he would always say that for him “it was a dream come true.” He typically would spend a morning transferring his notations, calculations, and separations from paper to workstation. I would arrive in the afternoon and one or both of us could start out by trying out instruments, adding layers, and coaxing the synthesizers into fulfilling one or another possibility of a particular sonic element. The resulting orchestras would provide the sonic framework or context for the singers.

Very often the resulting accompaniments would start accumulating complexity. Bob loved to hear multiple rhythmic delays swinging the notes around in the background, and some of these same processes would eventually be used with the singers as well. But we would usually create a separate track just for the singers consisting of basic chords, click track, and other helpful cues, as a way for them to navigate through the sonic traffic. By doing this, we could get as fancy as we needed with the accompaniment while making sure that we weren’t creating unnecessary performance confusion. In the rehearsals, the singers would be free to develop their characters unencumbered by the distracting accompaniment elements that we loved hearing in the final mix.
After working for one or two years on these pieces, we would start doing performances, often somewhere in Europe, where I would perform the sound mixing and processing, having then been part of the process from the first session to the final performance. And there was compensation in having an extended family that reached beyond the work itself; a group that could make something that sounded good, then fight about restaurant choices, take a day off together, and just stay in touch. And Bob always treated me at face value: I was a composer and a sound designer. Both things at once.

Every now and then, Bob would tell me that he had nominated me for some award, which I would then shrug off as a hopeless and quixotic mission. He would just lecture me, “You probably won’t get it, but you’ve got to go for it.” Only once did it work and it was enough for me to go to a festival and present a piece for a week.

I’m working right now with a group of 6 wonderful young singers, developing Bob’s last opera CRASH for the Whitney Biennial. They are the newest group of talented people to love Bob’s music and to work on it so diligently. CRASH is Bob’s most autobiographical piece. There are references to many of the pieces I’ve worked on in the past, and to stories from an earlier time that I’ve only heard in the retelling. As usual, Bob figured out a way to make music out of the words themselves. It’s a wonderful way for me to stay in the present.

A break during the 1999 European tour of Dust; (left to right) Joan La Barbara, Sam Ashley, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, and Robert Ashley.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny
I first met Robert Ashley in 1962 when I was 17 and he was 32. I had just left home in Texas with all my belongings in a paper bag and headed for Ann Arbor where a friend said a wonderful new music scene was happening like the one Phillip Krumm and I started in San Antonio. I had heard a few early electronic works by Robert (e.g. The Fourth of July) before I came.
When I got to Michigan on the bus I was given a place to stay with Gordon and Jackie Mumma and Mary Ashley helped me find work at the Institute for Social Research. And Robert said, “Bob Sheff has arrived in town, so let’s do a concert.” That’s the way I began working with him for the next more than 50 years, starting with the ONCE Festival and the whole lifestyle. (ONCE was more than just a concert once a year.)

Robert was an accomplished pianist having been misled by his friends into being recruited into the Army band in Texas. He taught me the secret of bebop. Robert was my friend and also acted as a mentor—he being 15 years older than me—in a big brother style, which I greatly appreciated. He always encouraged the people he knew as well as his students to develop whatever fascinated them, but like the best teachers never imposed a style or a “correct solution” and this has been appreciated by the many people he encouraged. In a similar way, inspired by Bob, contributors put together the ONCE festival, the ONCE group, and the Sonic and Arts Union. In Ann Arbor, he and Gordon Mumma created the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music which later led to the establishment of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, a non-profit public-access facility where synthesizers, a recording studio, a film editing studio, and a new music library plus one or more free concerts every week could be accessed by anyone.

All of Robert’s compositions show his admirable intelligence, gentle humor, and love of humanity. One of the earliest graphic and electronic pieces, She Was a Visitor for chorus with audience participation, is about how the actual sound the phonemes making up a word add an extra layer of meaning; this is how rumor is spread. (“It sounds like she’s arriving by trains, boats, and planes.”) His opera Perfect Lives is about the subtle realities of a small American town, a fascination which he and I shared in our different pieces. Robert Ashley made the first change in the structure and content of opera in the last 300 years.

All the personalities mentioned in Robert’s operas are appreciations of real people. His earlier graph pieces have personages like Kit Carson and Sitting Bull. There are references in his later operas to Giordano Bruno and Peanut, who now sits in the traffic island with the other disenfranchised people of Dust, remembering their lives. Some works are partially or wholly autobiographical and all persons are presented in a very touching and moving way. In his compositions, Robert often showed his compassion for abused and marginalized persons. For example, in Van Cao’s Meditation, he showed the Vietnamese composer still working on his pieces in isolation even though Van Cao was ostracized politically in his country. Bruno, who figures in Perfect Lives and Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), was burned at the stake for his discoveries and religious beliefs.
Like the most original composers (for example John Cage), each piece of Robert’s will teach you something you didn’t know before, and while the structure will be exact, each performance will come out completely different every time you perform it. “Confusion just means you are learning something,” he said. There was a mass excitement at the end of a performance of Combination Wedding and Funeral at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in the ‘60s.

Many of Bob’s instructions to me about various pieces required me to realize a concept, for example in Dust he said to me, “No patterns. No melody. No harmonies. Just make sounds that are somehow your impression of playing the piano and trying to interest a girl dancer (Joan Jonas) who shares the stage with you.” In order to do that I had to go back in my mind to before I studied the piano and forget everything.

Robert prepared his friends for his passing, again with humor. He remarked toward the end, “Well, no more solitude.” There are many subtle conceptual works that are probably just being understood now, for instance the Illusion Models and the String Quartet Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies, which like The Wolfman deals with the transformation of people in a world with random or Brownian Motion where that randomness is seen as a natural part of life rather than an abstraction. Conceptual art is not the same as abstract art.

Dinner in Paris following a performance of Dust in July 2001. Left to right: Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Cas Boumans, David Moodey, Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, and Robert Ashley.

Sam Ashley
I feel honored that I was able to work with Bob for so many years. It would be hard to say just how much I learned from him. It’s more like everything I know about music has been influenced by Bob and his work. He was a wonderful composer and to be sure a very dear friend.

Here’s something interesting: Bob based even his choices about his death on an idea of 14 year cycles. Why this simple fact is so wonderfully amazing is that it shows what music should really be about: living your ideas; practicing what you preach. Where the idea of 14 year cycles might have come from is not important here; in fact even the specific idea itself is not the point. What’s so wonderfully impressive is just that he would not hesitate to make the most fundamental choices according to his musical ideas.

Outstanding.

About sadness…
Yes, Bob died.

I have gotten really many personal messages from people expressing their sadness. They say “I feel so horrible…” then they add “…and I know you are feeling horrible too.”

But allow me to introduce something radical: don’t do the sadness part. Yes I know what’s intended: the sadness when somebody we love dies says he/she meant a lot. That’s wonderful. But the radical thing is to separate that appreciation, admiration, love from the sadness, keeping the loving admiration and respect, but dispensing with the heavy sadness.

Now, I know that sounds real strange to a lot of people. I have tried to express this several times over the years when friends I loved have died, and it has never really been easy to convey. So I understand. But I have to keep saying it. I mean, to care, to know that it matters, yes! That’s all good stuff.

There’s some background to this. Please don’t read this the wrong way, and I don’t know how to say it without running the risk of seeming pretentious, but: I have been a mystic for more than 45 years. An actual “shaman.” That’s not a word I toss around because it’s cool. I’m sure I’ve spent at least one third of my actual lifetime in trance. Being a mystic for real just means one thing ultimately: trance, lots of trance (“meditation”, whatever). Like hours/day every day. Everything that could be considered real “shamanism” flows from that. Because of this I have come to be (sorry if this sounds pretentious, hopefully it doesn’t) more comfortable with my own mortality. More than I would have been without the mysticism let’s say. So honestly, when someone I love dies, and I know that they were aware of what they were doing, it’s not something to be screwed up about. If you want to meet somebody in the spirit world… then be careful with the heavy emotions. They overwhelm the subtle stuff.

Now, some of you may know that I was in New York just recently visiting Bob and Mimi. I can tell you that it was my opinion that Bob could put his will behind healing and hang around for a few more years. Just for fun. And by the way Bob had such a strong intuition that he could have been a mystic if he had wanted to be. He was one in some ways. I mean he wasn’t in the full time sense, but he had a natural talent for it that was absolutely top notch. But the point here, of this letter, is: he decided that he didn’t want to try to heal. And I do mean this. He decided. He felt intuitively that he couldn’t recover. (He specifically told me that.) So although I disagreed, I can see it like, say he had decided to move to another city. I might think it’s a dumb move and tell him so, but to imagine that I’m entitled to say “No you can’t do that. I won’t allow it.” That would be sort of absurd. Ultimately it’s his choice. No big deal. Bob died like that. And incidentally he says so in his last piece CRASH (a beautiful piece, too).

So, look, I love you all for caring and I really do mean that. Thanks. But honestly, don’t worry. Keep it light. Trust in what I say here, and maybe even look into finding those things for yourself, too. Sadness is not doing anybody any good. And I know for a fact that Bob had pretty much the same attitude; he didn’t want anybody to be all consumed with sadness. That’s why he didn’t receive visitors for the most part in the last month or so.

Thomas Buckner, Sam Ashley, Robert Ashley, and Jacqueline Humbert during the Japanese tour of Dust in 1998.

Melody Sumner Carnahan
Nothing I had ever read or heard affected me like hearing Robert Ashley’s recording of “The Backyard” through a clock radio in a studio apartment in Palo Alto in 1978. After listening over and over to “the yellow record” I realized that free will was possible. I knew what I wanted to do. I followed that voice to Mills College where Bob agreed to be part of my 3-headed MFA committee (creative writing, book arts, and media arts). During the following decades, he lent his voice to many of my stories, which has resulted in audioworks and CDs.

As founder and editor of Burning Books, I worked closely with Bob to publish four complete librettos as books, beginning with his opera Improvement, and including Perfect Lives, Atalanta, and Quicksand. Working on books with Bob was such an education because of his precision with language and his completely original perspective on just about everything. The photo below was taken in 1984 when I was interviewing him for The Guests Go In To Supper.

Melody Sumner Carnahan with Robert Ashley, courtesy Melody Sumner Carnahan.

Bob was always a big supporter of my writing. He read and commented on everything I sent him. I read everything of his I could get my hands on. He wrote real letters. I conducted many interviews with him, in bars, in his studio, at my various residences in Oakland and New Mexico. During some of the lean years in New Mexico, Bob and Mimi kept Burning Books busy working on projects like Bob’s low rider opera, Now Eleanor’s Idea. He always surpassed himself. Never repeated anything. His thriller-ish novel, Quicksand (2011), was written to be produced verbatim as an opera libretto. Concrete is a monumental work in an entirely new form.

Bob began a memoir in recent years, which he later expanded for CRASH, which Burning Books will publish along with Concrete. Bob left us many masterpieces and much to do.

Robert Ashley with the next generation of performers who have embraced his music: Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons, and Gelsey Bell from the 2011 Varispeed production of Perfect Lives. Photo by Leonor Torres, courtesy Dave Ruder.

Dave Ruder
Recently a good friend, a singer by training and by vocation, commented that in my bio these days “vocalist” is the first of multiple descriptors I give myself. She was surprised. I thought it over. I’ve never been supremely confident in myself as a clarinetist, don’t seem that special compared to the million other guitarists around, haven’t been composing much per se in the last few years, have barely touched electronics of late. And yet, I find myself very busy musically. What is it that I do then, and when did it all start revolving around my voice? It all goes back to Robert Ashley.

Ashley’s biography gives hope to searching eclectics. It took him years to take his piano playing seriously, but he let it go a few years after finally feeling up to snuff. In his 30s, he made a name for himself with his style of open composition, dealing primarily with group dynamics, but gave up composing before the decade was out. In academia, he earned a doctorate but never claimed it and helped build a renowned music program at Mills, but it wasn’t where his heart was. And then, in his 40s, starting from the ground up, he used what materials he had at hand, most of all his own voice, redolent of Michigan with hints of the South and mixed in California and New York, and he made an astonishing body of work.

That was his journey. Mine is a very different one, but thus far it’s also brought me to my voice. There were years of warming up to this idea, in which I told and retold myself the melodious jokes of Perfect Lives like a middle schooler fawning over a PG-13 comedy. There were early attempts at performing the piece in public by reading it, which grew into the interpretations by Varispeed, through which we came to know Bob. Getting to hear his voice in conversation gave me new insight into the ways he heightened his speech into something more musical. The way he explained it to the cast of That Morning Thing, struggling to find the right way to pose short, simple questions in rehearsal, was that you had to “make it a little song”. At first, it was difficult to highlight what he was doing that differed from his everyday cadence, but gradually, with little other instruction, the switch flipped and we were all going crazy with our newfound powers of musical speech.

One of the greatest things that can be said for Bob’s band-leading is that he recognized that his iconic voice was best left to himself and he always allowed performers to find and develop their own voice. A piece like Concrete is a beautiful example of singers telling stories that at once convey Bob and the singer with complete clarity. In putting together Bob’s final piece, CRASH, the six vocalists have been asked to articulate three primary voices of narration, each vocalist inhabiting one of these voices at some point in the opera. While we’ve worked to fully explore the implications of each voice and have incorporated styles and techniques from one another with Bob’s blessing, we are ultimately playing the parts in our own ways.

The influence of the music of Robert Ashley is so thoroughly assimilated into my core that it’s never far away. In the too short time I got to know, he helped me find what was unique about myself. His vote of confidence in my work inspires me to work harder, be more open and more honest. His work remains a familiar mystery, to be puzzled over for decades to come, and through my investigations I’m amazed to come back home to my own voice. Thanks Bob.

Robert Ashley (far right) and his entourage during their 1999 European tour.

Alvin Lucier
I remember one night in L’Aquila, a beautiful city in the Abruzzi Mountains of Italy, the Sonic Arts Union—Bob, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma and myself—were sleeping in a dormitory room arranged for us by our sponsor. Throughout the night we could hear Bob reciting something in his sleep. He may have been rehearsing one of his vocal pieces or practicing ranting, a form of utterance he picked up and admired from those deranged people roaming the streets of New York. Anyway, it was entertaining and didn’t bother us at all. It was simply a part of touring with Bob.

For a few years in the early ’70s Bob Ashley wore a leather jacket. Every time he moved there was a crackling sound. He was a walking sound piece. If you closed your eyes and he walked into the room, you would know it was him. We were talking once about the future of music and he said he thought it was going to consist of pops and clicks.

Sometime around 1970 or so, the Sonic Arts Union was performing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. After the concert Bob and I went out for a drink. Since Yellow Springs was dry, we had to drive to Xenia (coincidentally the name of John Cage’s first wife), Ohio. We drove through cornfields. You know how straight those roads are. Pretty soon we came upon a roadhouse. We went in and the first thing we saw was a huge electric organ. It was just sitting there idle. I think it was a Wurlitzer. There was a row of men and women sitting up at the bar talking to each other very seriously. It seemed to me that none of the couples was married because they were having such interesting conversations. They were having fun, smoking and drinking. We sat down and Bob started talking about Jimmy Smith, the jazz organist, and the legendary pianist Bud Powell. After a while we went into Xenia to get something to eat. When we stopped at the same roadhouse on the way back, the scene was exactly the same. Here were these Perfect Lives going on and on. It felt timeless.

Robert Ashley in Japan for the seven city tour of Improvement in 1994.

A Master Communicator: Remembering H. Owen Reed (1910-2014)

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Charles Ruggiero - Headlines, Memorials

[Ed. Note: When Elliott Carter died in 2012 only a month shy of his 104th birthday the news made international headlines and even landed on the front page of The New York Times. In a great many of the memorials to Carter, writers opined about how he had been the last surviving composer of his generation, a link to a past which we no longer had. But another significant centenarian, H. Owen Reed, survived him, a composer with albeit a somewhat different, but also exemplary, career trajectory.
A Francophile as was Carter, Reed, who was born in Odessa, Missouri in 1910, obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in French in 1937 shortly after receiving Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in Music from Louisiana State University. But rather than going to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, as Carter had done a few years earlier, Reed, who also counted among his most significant compositional mentors an important female pedagogue, Helen M. Gunderson (1909-1997), enrolled at the Eastman School of Music where—under the tutelage of Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers—he obtained a Ph.D. just two years later in 1939. Private studies followed with Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Bohuslav Martinu, among others. He was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 which resulted in his spending six months in Mexico studying local folk music. That experience informed what his arguably his most popular composition, La Fiesta Mexicana, a work which has been performed all over the world and has appeared on numerous wind band albums since its premiere recording under the direction of the legendary Frederick Fennell. Because of the success of this composition, Reed has been credited with kindling many composers’ interest in writing for wind ensembles, something he continued to do extensively throughout his long career, although his output also encompassed works for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, and opera. While he might not be categorized as an avant-gardist, many of his scores explored unconventional musical notations and extended techniques. He composed extensively for jazz groups as well and his Latin-tinged “El Muchacho” was recorded by Cal Tjader.
A lifelong learner, into his late 60s, Reed was still embarking on field trips, traveling to Norway and the Caribbean to study the traditional music of those regions. His immersion in Native American culture, which involved extended stays at tribal reservations in Arizona and New Mexico inspired a trilogy of chamber operas based on Native American folktales. And Reed also remained active as a jazz performer, leading combos since his early 20s. Just last year, at the age of 102, he was still improvising at the piano.

Among Reed’s most important legacies was his devotion to younger composers. He spent four decades teaching composition at Michigan State University where he remained Professor Emeritus after his retirement in 1976. His many students included David Maslanka and Adophus Hailstork as well as the late Clare Fischer (1928-2012) who, in addition to his own compositions, arranged music for artists ranging from Dizzy Gillespie and the Hi-Los to Prince and Celine Dion. Reed also authored nine books which remain important reference materials for music students.
After learning of Reed’s death on January 6, it seemed most appropriate to contact someone who had ties to him both as a student and a professional colleague and someone who shared his passions for both contemporary composition and jazz improvisation. So we approached composer/percussionist Charles Ruggiero who had a nearly half century-long friendship with Dr. Reed (as he called him throughout his life), first as his student and subsequently as a fellow composition teacher at MSU. Ruggiero’s detailed account of that remarkable relationship offers those of us who were never fortunate enough to get to know H. Owen Reed, a personal sense of who he was as a composer, teacher, and human being. Another Reed alum and MSU faculty colleague, composer Jere Hutcheson, who actually knew Reed even longer than Ruggiero, has contributed some additional comments herein as well. —FJO]

Charles Ruggiero and H. Owen Reed at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp

I first learned of Michigan State University’s music program circa 1966 when I participated in the Villanova Jazz Festival as the drummer for the New England Conservatory’s jazz band. Supplemented by a lead trumpet player ringer from the Berklee College of Music, our band played well at Villanova, but we weren’t able to stay at the festival very long, so we didn’t hear many performances by other bands. On the long bus ride back to Boston, several NEC band members expressed optimism about our chances of winning the award for the best big band. However, the next day our faculty advisor told us that although we had played very well, the Conservatory’s band hadn’t been awarded the first-, second-, or even third-place award. The winning big band at Villanova that year was the MSU Jazz Ensemble. A few years later, when I decided to pursue a Ph.D., I placed Michigan State near the top of my short list, since in addition to having a strong doctoral composition program, MSU also offered excellent jazz performance opportunities and advanced courses in jazz arranging—just the curricular combination I was hoping to find!
Five of the six graduate programs I had applied to communicated with me mostly by mail, but H. Owen Reed personally called me several times while I was making my decision about where I would pursue my graduate degrees. He answered all the questions I had about MSU, the University’s composition program, the Lansing area, and the State of Michigan. Neither my wife, Pat, nor I had ever been to Michigan. We both were New Englanders who had been brought up in Connecticut and had spent much time vacationing in the mountains of New Hampshire. From our study of maps, Pat and I discovered that there were no mountains anywhere near Lansing, Michigan, and we were concerned that mid-Michigan might be a rather dull and foreign-looking place to live.

Dr. Reed (to signal my respect, I always addressed him that way), who had spent some time in Massachusetts, assured us that Michigan was a wonderful place to live. He told us that in the UP (which we eventually figured out meant a place many hours away from Lansing, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) there were some small but beautiful mountains and that in the Lower Peninsula there were lots of hilly areas similar to those found throughout the lower New England states. That sounded good to us. But what Dr. Reed told us about Michigan hills and mountains turned out not to be completely true. There are no mountains in Michigan that are even remotely similar to those found in New Hampshire, and real hills, like those one frequently encounters on bicycle rides in New England, are extremely hard to find! But Dr. Reed’s sales pitch wasn’t all bunk; we discovered after living in the Lansing area for several years, that Michigan, at least large chunks of it, are indeed quite beautiful.

When I told Dr. Reed that another Big Ten university had offered me a good paying half-time assistantship to teach percussion but that I wanted to focus more on composition and music theory and to study with him, it took him only a few days to call me back and offer me two assistantships, one in music theory and one working at WKAR-TV. I was delighted and honored that Dr. Reed had done this; it suggested not only that he really wanted me to come to MSU but also that he was proactive and capable of making things happen quickly even in an institution as large, complex, and often slow-moving as a Big Ten university.
It’s still not clear to me why Dr. Reed so actively recruited me. He always was supportive of me as a composer, in a general way, but at least early on in our relationship I think he was more impressed with my work as a percussionist than as a composer. Included with my application portfolio of compositions were recordings of me playing both one of my works for vibraphone and voice and a transcription for marimba of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor. Scoring for Percussion, an innovative and useful text written by Dr. Reed and Joel T. Leach was published in 1969, and in 1971 Dr. Reed still was strongly interested in all things percussive! Perhaps he was impressed by my recording of the Chopin and the fact that I was the percussion instructor at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, or, more likely, my credentials as a jazz drummer swayed him.

My 1971 MSU application included a very brief letter of recommendation written by John Mehegan. In the year before moving to Michigan, I had studied jazz theory and improvisation with Mehegan and then had become a member of his Connecticut-based jazz trio. (For his New York gigs, Mehegan used Art Blakey and other NYC-based drummers.) Mehegan was also a prominent jazz theorist, pianist, and critic (writing for Down Beat, the New York Herald Tribune, and other publications) who taught jazz improvisation at such prestigious schools as Julliard and Yale University as well as at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. From the 1940s on, Mehegan was at times very closely associated with Leonard Bernstein. H. Owen Reed had worked with Bernstein at Tanglewood in the early 1940s and may have been aware of Mehegan’s relationship with Bernstein. In any case, I was very pleased that Dr. Reed had accepted me into his composition studio, even if it was largely because of my work as a jazz drummer with Mehegan’s trio.

(From Dr. Reed’s earliest musical experiences as a Missouri boy studying piano—just after the peak of the ragtime craze and the emergence of stride piano—to his college days when he played trumpet in dance bands, to his years playing piano as a member of MSU’s Geriatric Six faculty jazz group during the last decade of his teaching career, he was inspired by jazz and thoroughly enjoyed performing it to the best of his abilities. He never claimed to be a great improviser or to possess extraordinary instrumental technique, but he surely did enjoy playing jazz, especially when surrounded by friends.)

*
I arrived in East Lansing in the summer of 1971 with great expectations about my studies as an MSU graduate composition major, but I soon was surprised and quite disappointed to discover that MSU’s jazz program had gone into a state of rapid entropy. The program had been founded in 1960 by Dr. Gene Hall (who had established the first degree-granting jazz program in the United States at North Texas State Teachers College) and had quickly developed into one of the best in the nation, led by such talented graduate assistants as George West and Bob Curnow, but by 1971, MSU’s jazz program was essentially leaderless and in shambles. On the other hand, I found studying with Dr. Reed to be a very positive experience. And I learned much from my work as a music theory teaching assistant and as a score reader and producer’s assistant at WKAR-TV, MSU’s public television station, which back then produced new 30-minute classical music shows every two weeks or so.

Some Additional Memories from
Jere Hutcheson

Owen and I remained close friends from the time I arrived at Michigan State University in 1963. I had chosen MSU for my doctoral study because of Owen’s reputation. In a sense, our relationship went back further than that. Both Owen and I had earned our MM degrees at Louisiana State, and in both cases Helen Gunderson was our major composition teacher. Owen was Gunderson’s first student with a graduate degree in composition, and I was her last. Gunderson spoke of Owen often, and she encouraged several of her students to apply to MSU’s doctoral composition program.

Owen was a natural-born leader. When a newly appointed director of MSU’s music department passed away suddenly, Owen was elected to complete the year as interim director. He was active in the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA), serving as chairman of its theory-composition section. When MSU was preparing to celebrate its centennial year, Owen was selected to compose an opera to commemorate the anniversary: thus sprang Michigan Dream. Owen was active on the faculty council that conceived and built the University Club. I suspect that his experience as the leader of his own jazz combos during his college days is where this quality for leadership began.

What do I owe to Owen Reed as a teacher? Owen was meticulous in matters of score preparation. This was especially important when composing for large ensembles, especially orchestra and band. He was also very knowledgeable in the area of percussion instruments, their special uses and notations.

Owen’s music had integrity. I never felt that there was any fluff there; every note was important. All of us who studied with him gained from his musical insight and from the integrity of his thinking.

There were other talented composers on MSU’s faculty in the early ’70s, including James Niblock and Jere Hutcheson, but Dr. Reed was the recognized leader of the composition area. He made all of the major decisions about the area’s admissions and degree programs, and he taught all or almost all of the graduate majors. When classes were in session, every Thursday from 3 to 5 in the afternoon, Dr. Reed held his seminars for composition majors in his large office on the fourth floor of the Music Practice Building, an office that was part of a two-room studio suite designed built for his exclusive use. By the 1970s, he was well connected in the field of composition, so there was a steady stream of established composers who presented their music and ideas about composition to his seminars. Most of these sessions were relaxed, somewhat informal, unscripted, and generally practical in nature; rarely did Dr. Reed or his guests talk about aesthetics, complex analytical systems, or other “erudite subjects.”

Although H. Owen Reed had written college-level textbooks on various aspects of “basic” music theory in the 1950s and ’60s, during my years of study with him, Dr. Reed very rarely discussed matters of tonal or atonal theory with me. Maybe by the ’70s he had decided that MSU students should study these topics with other members of the faculty. Or perhaps his then intense interest in percussion and notation, and his desire to focus his students’ attention on these topics, especially notation, left little lesson time for other things to be explored.

I thought my studies with Dr. Reed would be similar to the composition lessons I had taken at New England Conservatory, where normally each week I got a short assignment designed to help me develop specific techniques (mostly traditional contrapuntal and motivic variation techniques), but it turned out that most of my lessons with Dr. Reed were quite different. I had hoped Dr. Reed would help me better understand pitch structures in 20th-century music, explore new concepts of musical form, write more effectively for large ensembles, etc. Instead, for most of my lessons, Dr. Reed simply would have me show him what I had been working on during the past week, and then he would comment on, make suggestions for changes in, and ask questions about what I had written. Often, he would offer some praise and encouragement early in the lesson and then give me some advice on changes I might consider making. Sometimes, he would show me music he was composing, arranging, or notating at the time, pointing out details in his scores illustrating things he thought, perhaps, I should consider using in my music. Often, he would talk about various other things that were on his mind, not just music topics, but a recurring “theme” of my lessons with Dr. Reed was notation—all aspects of notation, including how to produce scores using a particular type of transparent film (large quantities of which Dr. Reed purchased with grant money) that he had recently adopted in place of traditional onionskin music paper—this was, of course, before most people had easy access to photocopiers and personal computers, both of which technologies have radically changed the way music is composed, notated, printed, and distributed.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Reed and many other members of the MSU community of composers were much interested in the latest music of George Crumb and other younger members of the art music avant-garde. Most of the things that fascinated us about such works as Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970), Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1971), Lux Aeterna for Five Masked Musicians (1972), and Vox Balaenae for Three Masked Players (1972), were at least partly notational in nature. It’s not by coincidence that all four of these Crumb works were published as facsimiles of the composer’s handwritten manuscripts. Traditional music notation, especially when typeset, simply wasn’t a flexible or rich enough symbolic language to express Crumb’s musical conceptions in meaningful, accurate, detailed, and performer-friendly ways.
Led by Dr. Reed, many MSU graduate composers were interested in finding ways to: specify indeterminate pitches and rhythms in our scores; clearly notate passages in which freer rhythms and arhythmic materials are combined with more traditionally notated rhythms; graphically represent the textures of our music more clearly than was possible using only traditional notation; notate “special” or “extended” instrumental techniques in coherent ways; provide performers with helpful markings and instructions that would increase the likelihood of having our music played well; etc. This was interesting stuff, to be sure, but scouring recent scores for innovative notations and figuring out the best ways of using the new film transparencies became almost an obsession for some of us at the time.

Although to this day I wish Dr. Reed had given me at least some technical exercises during my composition studies with him, over the years, as a composition teacher myself, I’ve come to a better understanding and appreciation of Dr. Reed’s composition pedagogy. With me, instead of following a pre-determined study plan, Dr. Reed dealt with issues as they arose in my writing, and while this didn’t allow for systematic development of compositional technique, other than notational technique, it did allow Dr. Reed to focus my attention on several very important matters. I think Dr. Reed’s game plan was to encourage me, primarily through focused praise of whatever kinds of music I wanted to compose, gradually building my trust in his judgment to the point where he could then make very critical comments about my work that I would take seriously but which would not discourage me from composing. I feel that this approach works well with many young composition students.

*
Like most teachers, H. Owen Reed had his “pet theories” and recommended practices that he reinforced by repetition. One of these was something I call prescriptive theory of compensating parameters. I can’t remember his own name for it. Anyway, his theory stipulated that when one or more parameters (melody and harmony, for example) become more complex, other parameters (perhaps rhythm and texture) should become less complex. When applied simplistically or rigidly, this idea becomes little more than a bromide, but I’ve come to appreciate its value. Although Dr. Reed’s theory of compensating parameters ran somewhat counter to the maximalist ideas of mid-20th-century composers like Milton Babbitt, at its core it reflected Dr. Reed’s profound understanding of what, how much, and how rapidly the human ear and brain can process music.
H. Owen Reed was a master communicator. I believe he was capable of holding at least a 15-minute conversation with just about any English-speaking person, regardless of that individual’s background, education, occupation, etc., at the end of which the other person quite likely would be thinking: “What a nice guy he is!” As host of his annual end-of-year party for his students at his Okemos home, Dr. Reed would charm all the young spouses of his male students, emphasizing his Missouri accent and turning on his genuine Southern charm. The next day, though, he could be perfectly at ease exchanging ribald limericks with some old colleagues. And when serious decisions had to be made, Dr. Reed could be quite businesslike, analytical, and ready and able to express his views as forcefully as necessary to make his points.

One of the things I learned from Dr. Reed is that there are times and contexts when it’s appropriate to discuss almost any topic, and other times and contexts when it is completely inappropriate to discuss almost anything. I remember being backstage with Dr. Reed at MSU’s Fairchild Theatre after a recital by Paul Zukofsky and Gilbert Kalish, during which they played the Ravel Sonata for Violin and Piano. On the other side of the stage one older member of the MSU string faculty was rather vehemently expressing to Zukofsky his disapproval of the inclusion of the Ravel sonata on the program because of its use of jazz and blues elements. Overhearing these comments, astonished and embarrassed, I intended to express my very different opinion of the Ravel sonata, and started to walk to the other side of the stage. But before I had taken two steps, H. Owen Reed grabbed me with one hand and locked my arm with his other arm, so that I couldn’t move. Although I hadn’t told him of my intentions, Dr. Reed had read my mind, and had determined that this was neither the time nor place for me to express my support of jazz in the concert hall!

Another time, many years later, after a concert in his honor at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan, many people, including some of the students who had just played his music, surrounded the famous ancient composer, telling him how much they enjoyed his compositions, how great he looked, how excited and honored they were to meet him and speak with him, etc. Dr. Reed smiled at each person he spoke with and told all of the student performers how beautifully they played his music and how much he enjoyed the program. After the crowd of Reed admirers dispersed, I paid my respects to my former teacher. We had a nice chat, some pictures were taken of the two of us, etc. Then I asked Dr. Reed if he enjoyed the performances of his music that he had just heard. The smile on his face straightened, he moved closer to me, and in a very serious soft voice he told me that his hearing had deteriorated so much that listening to live performances of his music was literally painful because of the consistently loud distortion of the high frequencies he had to contend with whenever he heard even moderately loud music.

Unquestionably the most important thing I took away from my composition lessons with H. Owen Reed was to have the courage and good sense to write the kind of music that I really want to write. Early on in my studies with Dr. Reed, I was struggling with an orchestra piece. I thought that I had a “good concept” for the work, but I had spent many hours working on it with relatively little music to show for all my time and efforts. The piece was consistently atonal, texturally dense, and rhythmically complex with no clear metric framework. At one of my composition lessons around the middle of the term, after he had noticed my lack of progress with the orchestra piece for several weeks, Dr. Reed studied my current draft of the score for a minute or two and then asked me why I hadn’t incorporated any jazz elements into the music I had brought to my lessons. I was stunned. He knew I was active as a jazz performer and arranger, and I knew that he was a true jazz enthusiast, but my composition lessons at New England Conservatory and my sense of what kinds of music graduate composition majors were “supposed to write” hadn’t allowed me to draw upon jazz in my “serious” compositions. Dr. Reed’s question opened the creative floodgates for me and helped me decide on the direction I would take as an artist for the rest of my life—a path that would take some courage but would allow me to speak with my own voice as a composer. That one lesson was worth the price of four years of MSU composition credits.

*
I’m sure that Dr. Reed had definite opinions about the music and careers of at least a few dozen of his former students, but when speaking with me, he always was a diplomat par excellence. In the 1970s and ’80s, I heard him cite the accomplishments of several of his former students enough times to conclude that he felt all of them were among a select group; the former students he mentioned most often to me were (in alphabetical order), Dinos Constantinides, Adolphus Hailstork, Jere Hutcheson, David Maslanka, and Bill Penn. I’m pretty sure Dr. Reed did not like their compositions (or those of any other of his students) as much as he admired some of the music of one of his teachers, Howard Hanson, but he certainly considered all five of these composers major talents. I find it interesting that I don’t have even the slightest hint about which of his former students Dr. Reed might have thought was the “best” or “most successful” composer. In the nearly 45 years I knew him, I can’t remember a single comment Dr. Reed made to me or to anyone else¬ that could be interpreted to suggest he felt any of his students was a better or more successful composer than any other of his many talented musical disciples—except, perhaps, for comments he made freely and frequently about one of his former students who attended MSU in the early 1950s.

If there was one student whom H. Owen Reed was the most proud of and whose music he liked the most, it probably was the jazz composer, arranger, pianist, bandleader, and Latin-jazz Grammy Award winner Clare Fischer (1928-2012). Typically, whether he was telling me about Clare Fischer’s days as an MSU music major, about Fischer’s latest jazz recording, or about Fischer’s arranging work for some pop-music superstar, subtle changes in Dr. Reed’s tone of voice and body language suggested to me that he felt Clare Fischer was unique among his students, a one-of-a-kind genius who had both exceptional musical skills and wide-ranging professional accomplishments that were unlike those of any of his other former students.

However, if Dr. Reed could have read the previous paragraph and if I could have asked him about it, I’m sure he would have said something like: “No, I don’t think what you’ve written is correct. Clare was a fine arranger and a fine composer, but I wouldn’t say he was a better composer than David or Jere, etc. And Clare’s greatest accomplishments were in jazz and popular music….” I’m sure Dr. Reed would have fine-tuned his diplomatic response so that it would have pleased (or at least not displeased) any former student mentioned.

Always Something New—Remembering Yusef Lateef (1920-2013)

Posted on January 16, 2014 by adamrudolph - Headlines, Memorials

Yusef Lateef and Adam Rudolph live in Milan 2012
Anyone reading this most likely already knows about the unique and deep beauty of Yusef Lateef’s sound. As with all the great musicians, we can recognize him upon hearing the first note. Yusef always said, “The tradition is to have your own sound.” And in fact the Dogon people of Mali have a word, “mi”, which describes the inner spirit of a person expressed though the voice of a musical instrument. When we hear Yusef play, we hear him always playing from the heart. I have witnessed both audience and performers moved to tears by his flute playing. I have heard Yusef play the entire history of the tenor saxophone in one solo. Always the story was deep, more than nine decades of life experience coming through—clear and beautiful. Look and listen: imagination, knowledge, and heartfelt expression are the guiding principles of real freedom.

Yusef Lateef in 2002. Photo by Kevin Ramos, courtesy Adam Rudolph.

I first met Brother Yusef in the summer of 1988 when I was living in Don Cherry’s loft on Long Island City, New York. We rehearsed there for a concert of Yusef’s with our group Eternal Wind (myself on hand drums and percussion, Charles Moore, Ralph Jones and Federico Ramos) plus Cecil McBee on bass. I was honored when Yusef asked me to bring my compositions for us to perform; in rehearsal he approached them with real interest and respect. That concert, produced by the World Music Institute, took place at Symphony Space in New York. Yusef had written all new music specifically for the occasion. I realize now that this was how he worked: every performance he did was always all new music. In the ensuing 25 years, Yusef and I performed and collaborated worldwide in many contexts: quartets, octets, with orchestras, and, most often in the last two decades, as a duo. He always brought new music and new creative processes and concepts to each concert and recording date. Yusef said, “With each project I try to do something I have never done before.” I have often reflected upon this; one of many seeds of wisdom that Yusef generously shared. For me, it suggests the idea of three qualities that I value deeply and which I saw Yusef embody in his life and work: creative imagination, studiousness and courage. A couple of personal experiences come to mind that illustrate these characteristics.

Yusef Lateef and Adam Rudolph: Formative Impulses (2003)
In 1995, when Yusef and I were discussing how to approach our second compositional collaboration The World at Peace for 12 musicians, Yusef suggested that for two of the movements I write for half of the instruments, telling him only which instruments I had written for, the tempo and how many bars it was. He would then compose, without seeing my music, for the other six musicians. At the same time, he would compose two other pieces, sending me only which six instruments he had chosen, the tempo and how many bars. So it also became my task to compose for the other six musicians without having seen what he had written. This seemed to me a brilliant and original idea. When we heard the combined music’s in rehearsal, we decided that three out of the four compositions worked, in that they sounded unlike any music we had ever heard before, while serving our expressive intentions.

Adam Rudolph and Yusef Lateef in 1996

Several years later, Yusef was asked by the Interpretations series to create an evening of music to celebrate his 80th year in a concert at Alice Tully Hall. In addition to asking me to compose some new music for this octet project, Yusef’s new idea was that we co-compose several pieces in a formula of writing alternating bars for the entire ensemble. For example, I would write the first five bars, he would write the next nine bars, I would write the next seven, and so on. The results were surprising, fresh and beautiful, and worthy of inclusion in the concert and the subsequent recording. On both of these occasions, I was inspired by Yusef’s courage and willingness to try completely new and unproven processes even in a major concert setting. And as I reflect upon it now, I wonder – how did Yusef think of these ideas in the first place? Yusef seemed to have no bottom to his wellspring of creative ideas, as anyone who has worked with him will attest.

The first recording I heard of Yusef’s was one of his early forays into an expanded western “classical” orchestration. As a fourteen-year-old growing up on the south side of Chicago, I was excited to be discovering both live and recorded music. I often raided my father’s vast record collection. The Centaur and the Phoenix thus found a regular rotation on my turntable and it still sounds fresh today. When I once asked Yusef about that recording, he told me he wanted to move beyond the codified instrumentation and harmonic materials prevalent at that time and “try something new.”

This amazing inventiveness seems to have always been in Yusef’s character. In the mid-1950s, he was one of the first improvising artists to embrace Middle Eastern and Eastern modes, rhythms, and instruments into his music. When asked about this, he told me that he wanted to have a long career creating music and to do so he would have to study as much about all kinds of music as possible in order to be able to vary his musical palette. Again, words to live by for the serious musician.

Yusef’s art traveled in higher dimensions, transcending medium or style. His telescope of intuition ranged far into deep space, towards new galaxies of thought and musical processes. He often referred to us as “musical evolutionists.” In speaking about his process he said: “When you get rid of one thing you have to replace it with something else.” As I see it, this means first having the courage to abandon something one may have invested years in developing. (In Yusef’s case, that was the harmonic structures that he and Barry Harris refined throughout the 1950s.) Then one must have the imagination to think of a genuinely new approach rooted in a foundation of musical substance and experience. This is no small task. Yusef’s amazingly diverse and inventive musical output of his last 25 years is testimony to his words. In 1985, following his return from four years of teaching, studying and performing in Nigeria, Yusef embarked on a new phase of his creative life. The way Yusef’s music opened up and expanded reminds me of his good friend and fellow evolutionist John Coltrane’s last years. In fact Yusef often quoted one of Coltrane’s favorite sayings: “Knowledge will set you free.”

As I see it, Yusef was a prototype of the modern renaissance artist. He refused to let any outside force define him or his activities. In addition to his compositions that have become central to the contemporary improvisers repertoire of “standards,” Yusef composed dozens of pieces for piano, chamber groups, choirs, and orchestras. He invented and built new musical instruments, carved bamboo flutes, taught scores of students, and published dozens of musical pedagogical studies (of which The Repository of Musical Scales and Patterns stands as one of the most important music reference books of the last 50 years). And this creative outpouring was not limited to music alone. In addition to earning his Doctorate in Education, Yusef painted and wrote two novels, Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue (which he made into an opera). He wrote several books of poetry, plays, and numerous articles on subjects ranging from Lester Young and Charlie Parker to Confucius and Martin Buber.

In 1992 Yusef started YAL records, which released over 36 recordings of what he called “Autophysiopsychic” music. He used this term to describe his music, which means “music coming from the physical, spiritual and mental self.” Over the years Yusef asked me to contribute my percussion, electronics, and arrangements to 18 of these recordings. He inspired me to start my own Meta records label and our two labels co-released several collaborative projects including Voice Prints (2013), Towards the Unknown (2010), In the Garden (2003), Beyond the Sky (2001) and The World at Peace (1997). Yusef was a great motivator: he made me aspire to realize my own creative potential. This is a gift I believe he has given to many.

Muhal Richard Abrams, Ornette Coleman, Yusef Lateef, and Adam Rudolph at the NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony in 2010. Photo courtesy Adam Rudolph.

Yusef, like all great artists, was never afraid of what others thought. He dedicated himself to following his own muse, cultivating his imagination with lifelong study and fearless experimentation. Although Yusef’s music had deep roots, he never wanted to recreate his past music. He always chose to make music that expressed what interested him in the present moment in his life. In 2010, when Yusef was awarded the NEA “Jazz Masters” award, they asked him to perform one of his older pieces with the Lincoln Center Big Band at the ceremony. Yusef informed them that his older music was not “where he was at” creatively any more. I was honored when a few days later he called and asked me to perform in duet with him for his portion of the evening’s events. The night of the awards Yusef and I stepped on stage following a rousing piece played by the Lincoln Center Big Band. After some moments of silence Yusef blew a solitary note on his bamboo flute. You could hear a pin drop—Yusef had (yet again) brought magic into the house. We continued with Tibetan bells, then moved to the blues via tenor saxophone and hand drums (accompanied by an electronic music tape that Yusef had created), then on into our piano and flute duet. Finally I played the didgeridoo while Yusef sang his rendition of the slave song “Brother Hold Your Light” (I want to get to the other side). Perhaps there had been some in attendance who initially wished to hear Yusef go back and revisit his music of the past. But Yusef wanted to present the person he was, who we were, at that place, at that time—in the moment of the now. Yusef received the standing ovation he richly deserved by an audience that included many of his peers. It was a great evening, and one I shall never forget.

Adam Rudolph and Yusef Lateef shake hands at the end of their concert at Roulette in April 2013, photo by C. Daniel Dawson.

In the fall of 2012 we did our last European tour around Yusef’s 92nd birthday, and in April of 2013 we played our last duet concert at Roulette in New York. Both in his playing and composing Brother Yusef continued to stay creative up to the very end. Only days before his passing he told me about new intervallic ideas he was developing. He sent his fourth symphony to the copyist only a couple months ago. This past October Yusef brought his sound and spirit to a concert of Go: Organic Orchestra at the Athenaeum in Hartford. It was his last public performance.

Adam Rudolph’s Aminita: Yusef Lateef with the Go: Organic Orchestra, recorded live in concert at The Electric Lodge in Venice, CA (2003).
Brother Yusef will continue to be an inspiration to many of us. I consider him to be my most important teacher, not only of music, but also of how to live as an artist and a human being. Over the years he became a true and dear friend. Anyone who spent time with Brother Yusef will testify to his kind and gentle nature. He radiated peace and love. He was a luminous being. To put it another way, as Yusef himself said recently, “Brother Adam, have you noticed the leaves waving to you? It’s okay to wave back.”

Adam Rudolph’s Morphic Resonance featuring Yusef Lateef with the Go: Organic Orchestra, also from the 2003 performance at The Electric Lodge.

Remembering Jim Hall (1930-2013)

Posted on December 17, 2013 by Dom Minasi - Headlines, Memorials

Guitarist Jim Hall at the Village Vanguard, New York, NY. Photo © by David Korchin.

Jim Hall has left behind some of history’s finest art, and is to be loved deeply. His memory will bring joy, not sorrow, for what he’s left us shall always mark greatness, as well as a precious map for many others to follow. Bravo Jim Hall!

—Pat Martino

In 1995, three of my students were graduating from LaGuardia High School in New York City. LaGuardia is one of the finest schools in the country for high school students who want to study the arts. Many of the graduates have gone on to become professional musicians, actors, dancers, and visual artists. As a graduation gift for these talented young players, I decided to take them to the Village Vanguard to hear and meet Jim Hall. Why would I do that? I knew Jim would be very receptive to meeting them and he was—as always—friendly, gracious, and very happy to take the time to say hello and talk to them.

Of the many guitarists I’ve seen or heard, Jim was constantly evolving. In 1995, Jim was 65 years old—five years younger than I am now, but to me, then and now, his age meant nothing, but his music meant everything.

I first met Jim in 1968. Oddly enough it was because of guitarist Chuck Wayne. Bassist George Cebra told me about jam sessions that were happening in Brooklyn every Tuesday night. Guitarist Louis Sossa owned a dress factory where he ran these jam sessions, which consisted of guitarists getting a chance to play with Chuck Wayne. The sessions would last till 4:00 a.m. The first time I went there, I just sat and listened, stunned by the number of guitarists who could really play and, particularly, how amazing Chuck was. But the one thing that got to me was the idolization of Chuck; everyone spoke as if he was the only jazz guitarist in the world. Sometimes I would say to the disdain of others, “What about Jim Hall? He’s different from anyone around; he’s not a bopper but a modern player, which is much hipper.” Frown, frown, and frown!

I finally sat in one night. I distinctly remember we played “I’ll Remember April.” When it was my turn to solo, I got so nervous that my left hand started to shake and I could hardly play. I was frozen. When it was over, I was so embarrassed that I left immediately and never went back. I couldn’t believe that I reacted

that way. I went into a deep depression that lasted for a while. I tried to practice my way out of it, but that wasn’t working. I knew I had to do something, but what? I needed to get over the fear of playing with well-known or famous musicians. Since I loved the way Jim Hall played and I knew he lived in New York, I found his number and called him to set up a time for a lesson.
It was a Saturday afternoon. Jim greeted me at the door. The first thing I noticed was he wasn’t as tall as I had imagined. I took out my guitar and we sat down and talked. The first thing he asked— which is the first thing I ask advanced students—was, “Why are you here?” I didn’t tell him about the Chuck Wayne incident, but instead I told him I was having trouble with very fast tempos, which was true. He called a tune and we played. The thing I loved about him was how relaxed he made me feel. There was no ego there, no “look how great I am.” He was genuinely there to help me. He showed me some improv exercises to work on and we agreed that I only needed to see him once a month. I walked away feeling good. I was totally relaxed when we played together.
Once a month I would show up and we would play. Jim would comment on my improv, but in a constructive way, which I appreciated. The one observation he made about me, which I’ll always remember was, “Do you have to play so many notes?” And I replied, “Yes.” I know he was trying to slow me down and play more meaningfully, which I understood, but I was trying to get to the same place that Coltrane was. Many would argue that on guitar it doesn’t work, but I truly believe it can be done.
The last and sixth lesson was the best thing for my ego. We played “On Green Dolphin Street” with a killer tempo. When we finished Jim looked at me and said, “We’re done. You don’t need to come back. You keep playing like that and you’ll be fine.
If it were someone else, I probably would have spent a fortune and not gotten better at all. That was Jim. He gave you just what you needed and that has been his approach to his improvisations: just the right amount of notes, no more no less, played with impeccable style and a tone that leaves you wanting more and more.

When I first met Jim he wasn’t as busy as he would have liked to be. I know this because he would tell me he would start practicing for a gig a few weeks before to get ready, and he was always ready.

As the years progressed, I would stay in touch by visiting him at the Ed Sullivan Theatre where he and Chuck Wayne held down the guitar chairs for The Merv Griffin Show. Once I brought my first published book, A Guitarist’s Guide to Chord Substitution. He was very supportive and showed it to Chuck. I miss those days.

After The Merv Griffin Show ended in the mid-1980s, Jim became very busy, as did I, but we stayed in touch. When I signed to Blue Note he was very happy for me.

Later on in the ’80s after going through a divorce and moving to Manhattan, I went through a crisis of self worth, including my playing. I kept getting accused of playing too far out, but for me that was what I wanted to do. However, I also wanted to work. Jim was playing at the Blue Note one week. I sat at the bar and watched and listened to him play. I don’t remember much from that night except his version of “Blue Monk.” He took an inside-out approach and it was in his usual style, loose and spare. A light went off in my head and I knew what I had to do. I began in my own way to play inside out, and it was because of Jim. He has always been an inspiration to me.

When I started my own record company, the first release was Takin’ The Duke Out. I sent Jim a copy. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind giving me a quote to use. A few hours later he faxed me the quote that I have saved, “New York’s best-kept secret is finally getting out!” Over the years I kept Jim apprised of what I was doing by sending him each new release.

The last time I saw him was when he was awarded a fellowship at the NEA Jazz Masters event in 2004. As far as I was concerned, it was long overdue. After the event, press and fans surrounded him as he tried to make his way out of the huge hall. I was in the middle of the crowd and just waved to him. He stopped what he was doing, came over to me and said, “I am so proud of you.” I was so touched because he was the one being honored; it has stayed with me ever since.

After Jim had a back operation a few years ago, I would talk to him every few months to see how he was. I was so happy to know he became active again. A few weeks ago, I watched a video of him performing with Peter Bernstein. Although it was a treat to see and hear him, I was concerned. He didn’t look good and on his birthday I thought I would give him a call but, being busy, I forgot. A few days later he passed away. I never had a chance to say goodbye.

Jim was the epitome of a total musician. His musicality will be an inspiration to the thousands of guitarist who will come after. He made the world of jazz a better place for all of us.

The following is from Peter Bernstein, the last person Jim worked with:

He will be missed, but left us so much to learn from as a musician and person. He was such a thoughtful and empathetic person and these qualities were expressed with such beauty and individuality in his playing. His aesthetic was so unique in that it embodied meaning in every note… His subtlety, nuance, and great expression were his alone: a true original, identifiable from one of those well-chosen notes. Jim Hall was a poet who played the guitar.

I couldn’t have said it better. Goodbye, old friend. You will have a place in my heart forever.

***Dom Minasi has been active in jazz for over 40 years as a composer, guitarist, producer, educator, author, and journalist. Highlights of his extensive discography include I Have the Feeling I’ve Been Here Before (Blue Note, 1975), Finishing Touches (CIMP, 1999) Takin’ The Duke Out (CDM Records, 2001), and Angel’s Dance (Nacht Records), an album of duets with pianist Michael Jefry Stevens released in November 2013.

When Sunny Gets Blue—Remembering Harold Shapero (1920-2013)

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Daniel Felsenfeld - Headlines, Memorials

Harold Shapero, photo from the Library of Congress collection, courtesy Peermusic Classical

“You kids,” Harold Shapero brayed in his trademark voice that sounded like a Boston Brahmin gone extra to seed, or Lenny Bernstein had he smoked even more cigarettes, “you don’t know your harmony. If Nadia Boulanger were alive, she’d be dead.” Or something like that. “When I was in school,” he would say (as eyes rolled near-audibly) “we had to know our harmony.” Harmony, harmony, harmony, apparently we kids—who were not an undistinguished, and were a by-no-means-harmony-ignorant crowd—seemed not to care. Oh sure, he would bristle, we knew our dodecaphony (not a serialist in the bunch), we knew how to work our notation programs (few actually did; this was two decades ago) but we did not know our—say it with me—harmony. Such was the acerbic nature of this graceful and elegant composer, an elder iteration of a young Turk from an era of some pretty astonishing young Turks, wizened but also wise, a composer of a slim but important catalogue, a composer whose career might not have been as expansive and all-important as his early promise showed (whose is?), but more than anything, to the very depths, to the marrow, a perceptive, sharp, elegant, witty, and profound composer. Like many who leave us, he leaves me with that complicated feeling that this was a difficult man and that I wish I’d known him better.

I had the chance to attend classes led by “Sunny” Shapero (or was it “Sonny”?) for a single, important semester in a graduate composition seminar at the New England Conservatory in the mid-1990s—he had been borrowed from nearby Brandeis University, and I was beyond thrilled. I had rolled into Boston the previous year to take my master’s degree, and through my hefty box of Bernsteiniana, Copland-obelia, and Stravinskyologia, Shapero’s name was one I knew well. As the composer of the award-winning Symphony for Classical Orchestra, a close friend of Igor Stravinsky, and, closest to my own vocal-music-loving heart, a dedicatee of one of the songs in Copland’s masterful Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, a piece that I wrote many a paper on and even played in public, to the anguish of the notion of pianism (though I suppose I held my own), the name and work of Harold Shapero were known and mythological to me. Much like Arthur Berger, my own teacher at the time (who also had his own Dickinson song—I was racking them up!), Shapero was a name I knew well as a kind of sideman to history, part of a world into which I was dying to be accepted, a world that had vanished before I even had a chance.

Like every reminiscence for the dead, this elegy stands for the living, the dead being gone and therefore disinterested, stranding the author as ill-equipped camera and lens looking at a faded snapshot of someone gone too soon—because everyone is gone too soon. And it is hard for this living composer not to see the departed Shapero as not only the bristling, often vulgar man I remember, but as the end of an era, the period on a sentence, the final clause in an important but also completed chapter—and yet I will try to not calcify him into a notion or a trend or an idea, because while I am still alive and he is gone, he deserves better. He was, while he walked among us, a vastly talented and flawed and wonderful person, in whose once-a-week presence I now understand how fortunate I was to be that important semester so long ago. I cannot believe I have come so far from that, so long has passed, that Shapero has written his last composition and my stories of him—which are legion, some unrepeatable in respectable company—are the last I will have.

Mr. Shapero did not leave us much—two dozen pieces, give or take. More curious (devastating?) was the sad fact (was it?) that he spent the years from 1960 to 1988 quietly not composing. In the words of one of my beloved teachers Malcolm Peyton, discussing that crucial moment when Stravinsky went twelve-tone, the “sky fell out.” And there is truth to this, too much truth. The sixties in sepia retrospect seem really great, but they had to have been also truly terrifying, and maybe Shapero, with his punchy neo-classic dissonances and capacious gifts with a graceful melody, lost his corner of the sky to what must have seemed an ugly and menacing threat coming down the block. It is easy to depersonalize this, or to see the trends of the Great Metanarrative of history as a clean, clear inevitability, but one wonders (if one was not actually there) how personally scary this must have been, to have the toe-hold Shapero had (Rome Prize, pals with Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland) and to watch it all potentially sink into a kind of pit of obsolescence—to watch Xenakis, Carter, Boulez et al. ascend the “throne” and likely feel that their world was wrapping up quickly. My then-principal teacher Arthur Berger handled it one way—he went there, composing “with intervals” as he liked to call it, he who coined the word “octatonic” and who wrote some truly astonishingly beautiful works with similar thrust to Shapero, to Copland, to early Elliott Carter—while some, like Ned Rorem and Shapero’s much-vaunted ally Bernstein, simply soldiered on doing what they were doing. And then there was Shapero, who for reasons I was too terrified to ask him (and now wish I’d had more courage) just stopped.

A memory: Stravinsky’s amanuensis Robert Craft came to talk about, yes, Stravinsky, and who joined him in heckling our illustrious host that afternoon, a composer whose name I shall do him the courtesy of omitting. Yes, Sunny Shapero, along with the grumpy set of Arthur Berger, Leon Kirchner, and Craft himself, formed a kind of Statler-and-Waldorf mélange and grumbled their displeasure in a kind of 20th-century charivari. A memory: Shapero, walking along the hallway in the far building, stops to look in a classroom, then stops to contemplate a fire extinguisher for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time, then proceeds. A memory: when I confused a piece of Irving Fine for something Shapero himself had written, and I was vastly embarrassed—he found this hysterical, and complimentary. A memory: Arthur Berger, when in a lesson I told him that I was taking Shapero’s seminar, said that I would not be able to get away with anything because Shapero was that perceptive, something I hold he was both spot on and totally wrong about. A memory: Shapero had been down to Florida and had heard Symphony in Waves by Aaron Kernis, and came back positively raving. Only when he put on a recording of the slow movement, at a certain point, with the movement dragging he felt, he screamed “oh COME ON” at the stereo as the CD spun and spun…
That is not the end of the story. Shapero did return to his work, and when we met him he brimmed with enthusiasm about exactly two things: the trumpet concerto he was writing for Doc Severinson, and his newest love, Finale software. This was, to him, beyond astonishing (and mind you, this was the mid-1990s, when Sibelius was a fledgling software available only on a dedicated Acorn machine and affordable only to the likes of Michael Tilson Thomas). We kids knew this quite well, and many a long, painful seminar hour was passed in discussing these mechanics—at the time, I used only a pencil and a ruler, so this meant little to me. Fine, fair enough, he was entitled to be enthusiastic about a new toy, but one crushing moment happened, one I will never forget. Flush with the excitement of being able to play us his concerto before he submitted it to Mr. Severinson, he brought a CD recording of a MIDI reduction, beaming. And before he hit play, he overran “you kids are about to have your socks knocked off because this sounds like a real orchestra, a little tinny perhaps, but a real goddamn orchestra. You won’t be able to tell the difference.” Needless to say, what came out of those modest speakers on that snowy day in the Boston of my youth sounded nothing—nothing—like a real orchestra. It sounded like an angry video game calliope. I don’t know if furtive glances were actually exchanged, but I will probably never forget that feeling. It felt like rust.

This is also not the end of the story. I do not know what became of the concerto, but a few weeks later I was able to hear the world premiere in Jordan Hall of his woodwind quintet, a piece called Six for Five, and it was genuinely something, frothy, ebullient, spiky—all the watchword Shapero thumbprints were readily in evidence. He fumbled around in the middle of the hall, nervously hectoring his wife to be certain the recording device was working properly. But as usual, once one saw past his coarse exterior, one could tell that something lighted in him, that he was in his element. He smiled broadly as he bowed, left the stage, and though this was years ago, I only saw him one more time. It was in the hallway, and he looked at me and said, “Oh, you were one of the members of our ill-fated class. Did you ever learn your harmony?” I did, Mr. Shapero, thank you, I really did.

***

[Ed. Note: Though mostly remembered today for his 1947 Symphony for Classical Orchestra (which was recorded by both Leonard Bernstein and André Previn), Harold Shapero also composed several piano sonatas as well as a formidable sonata for piano four-hands, a significant sonata for trumpet and piano, several chamber works for strings, a wind quintet, a work for jazz ensemble that Gunther Schuller conducted, and a handful of vocal pieces. New World Records has issued two recordings devoted exclusively to Shapero’s music and has also included additional works by him on various instrumental collections. Below is a recording of the last movement of his String Quartet (featured on one of New World’s all-Shapero recordings), which was composed during his undergraduate years at Harvard and is dedicated to his teacher, Walter Piston. (The entire piece is available on CD from from Amazon and for download from iTunes. The score is available from Peermusic Classical. Hopefully more interpreters in the future will discover this extremely well-crafted and rewarding music.—FJO]

Incredible Time (to live and die): Remembering Dean Drummond

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Elizabeth Brown - Headlines, Memorials

Dean Drummond and Elizabeth Brown at the premiere of Seahorse (2008)

The first time I heard Dean Drummond’s Incredible Time (to live and die) I was floored. I listened to it over and over. As a lover of glissando and reverb, the zoomoozophone (which he invented) was like a dream. I was completely smitten with Incredible Time‘s intricate flute part, played by Dean’s wife Stefani Starin. The microtuned synthesizer, triggered by both a keyboard player and percussionist, tied it all together. Like all of his music, it made you aware of your place in the world at the present moment. Dean’s musical universe is a sublime architecture of numbers, ratios, and rhythmic patterns. Throughout an insanely busy life, he steadily built a body of complex, beautiful music that reflected his acute social conscience.
On April 13, Dean died of complications from multiple myeloma. He led a multi-dimensional career as composer, instrument inventor, conductor and musician through hundreds of performances and numerous recordings with Newband. As director of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium, he honored Partch’s legacy by preserving his instruments and performing his compositions—and he kept that legacy alive by writing and commissioning new pieces, and by building and adapting new instruments. Dean also inspired a generation of students as director of the Harry Partch Ensemble at Montclair State University.

My friendship with Dean developed through my deepening involvement with the instruments that defined and propelled his music. We shared a passion for timbre and microtonality, though mine is more instinctual and based on harmonic gravity. Over the last twenty-five years, I wrote three pieces for the Partch instruments, hands-on, in three different studios. What was it like to work closely with Dean, and with the original Partch instruments? His sense of humor really helped in dealing with tedious technical and logistical issues. I saved some of our email exchanges:

DD: The boo is being repaired and is unavailable Friday evening, Nov 16. The marimba eroica is being repaired and is unavailable from Friday morning, Nov 16, until Monday morning, Nov 19. Beginning Nov 23, most instruments will be at Japan Society in NY for a couple weeks. The instruments will be set up by Dec 11, but used all day Dec 12 by students. Beginning Dec 13, the studio is very free until Jan 21. You can still reserve time after that, but classes begin Jan 22 (my birthday). We should meet briefly the first time, at 5pm on Dec 12. Then you can stay at the studio as long as you want. You need to reserve the times you will use with me 48 hours in advance in order to guarantee having exclusive use.
EB: We’d better synchronize our watches on 12/12 (which is my anniversary, as well as Virgin of Guadalupe day). I assume you mean I should reserve other times at least 48 hours in advance, not exactly 48 hours in advance of each visit.
DD: no, I meant exactly. if you want to use the studio at 3:30 on Dec 13th, you must reach me by phone (voicemail is unacceptable) at exactly 3:30 on Dec 11th. There’s a grace period of 45 seconds before and after. I’ve invested in a very sophisticated satellite timer which will prompt me to call you at precisely the right time to reserve the studio.

Dean’s sense of organization was legendary. Colleagues say his budgets had the rigor of a CPA’s. Numbers were effortless for him. The exchange below concerns tuning only one of the instruments:

EB: Dean – I tuned harmonic canon 1 yesterday, and had trouble getting to a couple of the pegs (I gave up on the 41st string on the left side)…
DD: I didn’t know that you were using HC I. fyi, there are two different tunings happening on a weekly basis. It gets tuned to the standard tuning on Thursdays and gets changed to my tuning for MS Genitron on Fridays, although some weeks, if someone comes in to practice the changes might be made at other times. So it was probably on my tuning when you came in. My tuning changes X strings 41-44 plus the Oak bridge setting.
EB: I thought I’d told you I was using canon 1! Will try to keep your schedule in mind when tuning it. Have a feeling I tuned it to the standard tuning with the oak bridge in place for MS Genitron, apologies!
DD: The high X bridges don’t move for the tuning, but the Oak bridge must or the string tension is wrong. You actually erred towards loosening the strings so no harm done…

Writing Archipelago (1990)
I first met Dean through cellist Ted Mook, who was playing with Newband in the late 1980’s. Ted asked me write a piece with cello for a Newband concert. The concert’s repertoire was limited to the instruments in Partch’s Daphne of the Dunes, plus zoomoozophone and synth. Dean gave me hands-on access to the instruments in the Partch studio, which was near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. I was just a fledgling composer, and this was a very big deal! Not understanding the math, I composed by ear (using a Yamaha DXVII2 Synthesizer loaded with Partch’s 31- and 43-note microtonal scales at home). I taught myself to read and write the tablature notation for each instrument. In the studio, I reveled in the funkiness and tactile nature of the Partch instruments, and the amazing reverb of the zoomoozophone. If the instruments were tuned correctly, they would play EXACTLY the pitches I wanted! The wobbly sound world in my head came to life under Dean’s direction.

After Newband obtained custody of the Partch Instruments in 1990, many presenters wanted all-Partch programs, but Dean continually advocated for other composers to be included on Newband concerts. I was lucky—Archipelago was performed many times, and included on the Music and Arts CD Dance of the Seven Veils.

Writing Delirium (1997)
When Newband commissioned Delirium through the Cary Trust, the studio had moved to SUNY Purchase, and I don’t drive. Typically, I’d get up early and travel several hours on public transportation to the studio. Once there, I’d spend a long time tuning the string instruments I was using, then have maybe an hour to work before it was time to head home. This took the entire day, which Dean thought was both pathetic and funny. I vowed to never again write for Kithara II, with its 12 sets of hard-to-access strings tuned to bizarre hexads. If it wasn’t perfectly in tune, what I wrote sounded awful. But, Newband performed Delirium deliriously well under Dean’s direction, quite a few times.

At Dean’s memorial service on April 20, each person described him as fiercely individual and principled, and passionate about music—but also nutty. Lois V Vierk said that Dean was her very first composition teacher, during her freshman year at California Institute for the Arts. She wrote a piece for flute, cello and teapot (Dean played teapot). Pianist David Witten remembered Dean saying that the only use for a (well-tempered) piano was to fill it with warm milk and take a bath in it.

The many percussionists at the service were in awe of Dean and his music. Gary Kvistad remembered helping Dean build the zoomoozophone in his barn. Gary Schall recalled that the very first live performance on zoomoozophone was at his Manhattan School of Music percussion jury. Jimmy Pugliese spoke about learning Dean’s “Columbus” on the top two registers of the zoomoozophone, while Dean was still building the lower registers—because Dean was always creating something.

If we had been out of touch for a while, I was always astonished when we reconnected by what he had accomplished during that time. In 2009, I saw a terrific, insane concert version of his comic opera Café Buffé.

DD: Thanks for coming out the other night! The last couple months have been crazy. The night before the first rehearsal of the opera I finished editing a film project….which is going to be shown every Friday I think as part of the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim. Next I’m composing MacBeth music for Martha Clarke. I think I’m finally going to learn a little theremin for that!

He’d gotten a theremin years before, and we were both obsessed with the instrument. After I married my long-time partner Lothar Osterburg in 2003, he wrote:

DD: Do you know about this?!!!! It’s a theremin band!
http://www.lotharandthehandpeople.com/
EB: Yes, all the theremin players are jealous I married somebody named Lothar. It’s an old band; Lothar was the name of their theremin.
DD: I figured your marriage had to have some sort of sleazy career-building aspect!
EB: Having a husband with a volume control antenna is extremely useful.

Writing Seahorse (2008)
Through Dean, I was commissioned to write a piece for the Montclair State University’s Harry Partch Ensemble. He wanted me to play in the piece, and help coach it, so I wrote a theremin concerto. I figured that if I could play each part, the students could too – so I made a recording for the students by playing and overdubbing all the parts.

DD: We all listened to your CD this morning. I should say attempted because your piece, or at least the CD, has the remarkable ability to put people to sleep. No matter how many times we tried to start it, everyone was out by the zoomoozophone entrance. We tried the beginning of “Drunken Waltz,” too, and it got the same effect before the theremin was to enter. We’ll just have to hope it’s different when we try to rehearse.
EB: Great! that’s exactly the response I hoped for! So many people have trouble getting to sleep nowadays that audiences will flock to hear Seahorse, possibly wearing pajamas!
DD: Well that explains why there’s line of people wearing pajamas outside of our house. On the other hand, over in Montclair, thousands of students are in front of the president’s office protesting the performance of Seahorse. Campus police confiscated all copies of your music and said only a licensed anesthesiologist could play the CD of Seahorse. Now I’ll never know what it sounds like.

But then, he also wrote:

DD: It’s fantastic….really mean it. I think it’s going to be amazing. The parts are very playable so great possibility for a great performance. It’s a piece that I’d like to also do w. Newband asap. The students loved the mock-up tape. They all feel very lucky to have this piece. I do, too.

And I was lucky to work with those students! Seahorse was premiered in December 2008. Last year, I received a New Music USA CAP award to record Seahorse with Newband for New World Records. Dean let me use his theremin so I wouldn’t have to schlep mine, and even arranged for parking reimbursement.

EB: I doubt if I’ll have time to learn to drive until after the Seahorse recording, and Lothar won’t let me use our car until I do. He seems to think that if I can play theremin I should be able to drive. So unfortunately I cannot take advantage of the free parking.
DD: Your theremin doesn’t drive? I have the model that does. It parks anywhere.

The Seahorse recording was wonderful! Newband sounded great, and Dean played Adapted Guitar 1. He looked terrific and seemed healthy. I chose to believe his multiple myeloma was in remission, because the alternative was unbearable. Afterwards, he said he was feeling pretty good because he’d scheduled his chemo around the recording. He was receiving heavy chemo for three weeks, with one week off. He said he had no idea how long he had left to live. In the meantime, he was enjoying every single day.

Dean Drummond and Elizabeth Brown (center) with the members of Newband at the recording session for Seahorse

He never heard the final edit.
There would have been a Newband Concert at Heidelburg University in Ohio on April 13, the day Dean died. The program would have included pieces by Partch, Drummond, and Cage, plus Dean’s arrangement of Bach’s Es Ist Genug for 4 zoomoozophonists.

*
From Charles Bernstein’s libretto for Dean Drummond’s Café Buffé:

The world swirls around me
It’s a mystery I’m here at all
The world swirls around me
It’s a mystery I’m standing here at all
Got a telegram from eternity
Said it was time for me to call

There’s no time like the present
And the present’s already gone
No time like the present
And the present it’s already gone

***

Thanks for the company
Thanks for the music

*
What an incredible life!

Remembering Robert Ward (1917-2013)

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Michael Ching - Headlines, Memorials

Robert Ward with Michael Ching in 2000.

I have been lucky to have had a number of great teachers and colleagues, but Robert Ward stands out first amongst them. Even back in 1977 when I first met him, his hair was mostly a distinguished white. His fatherly manner was always warm, and even when he was vehemently arguing a point, he never seemed truly angry. Bob’s inner composer was a respected and valued member of society, and so he frequently could be seen in a good suit or sport coat and bow tie. He believed that artists weren’t always outsiders, but people who deserved a place at the table beside donors, industrialists, and scientists in order to provide a different perspective on society.
Bob Ward believed in providing his student composers with opportunities to hear their works performed under the best possible circumstances. When he realized that a couple of us at Duke had finished orchestra pieces, he arranged for the North Carolina Symphony to come over and read them. When I decided to write a one-act opera for a senior thesis, he arranged for it to be produced and sung by experienced professionals. Bob was very insistent that composers be able to play and sing every note of their operas in order to remain honest to their inner ear. He also felt that by trying to play and sing a show, composers would learn what the singers have to go through to learn the notes. Back then in 1980, for me, coaching and listening to MET roster singer Michael Best try to get through my vocal lines was a priceless lesson.

Bob was really great at encouraging you to write in whatever style you wanted to. This was particularly important back in the ’70s and ’80s when music composition was in the grip of what felt like life or death battles over atonality and twelve-tone technique. Despite those prevailing stylistic winds, Ward kept to his tonal and often tuneful style. I remember a composition teacher at a summer festival describing Ward’s music as “awful.” But it was not awful! It was simply an American sound that was prevalent in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the sound of Gershwin or Gould and Bernstein. Robert Ward believed that sound still communicated with audiences, and he was going to write in that manner with all the technique and integrity he could muster. He never really deviated from that path.

After our days as teacher/student, Bob and I got to work on a couple of other projects together, including the premiere of Minutes Till Midnight at what is now called the Florida Grand Opera. That opera has a great aria in it where the main character, a nuclear scientist, asks, “Oh cosmos, with your myriad stars, afloat in the mystery of space, will your mantle of peace descend on this tormented place?” That kind of lyric about world peace inspired Bob.

Bob was something of a socialist at heart and not a fan of organized religion. He was toying with the idea of an opera about the labor leader Eugene Debs in his later years. The church certainly was not portrayed in a favorable light in his opera Abelard and Heloise. His progressive politics were mixed with old fashioned ideas about marital roles. In a fairly recent conversation with me, he said archly that now that I was a freelancer, I was lucky that my wife had a steady job. Even in his crackly older voice, you could hear the sound of friendly chiding. But indeed, I think Bob was justifiably proud of the fact that he had earned a living through his art and had been a good provider for a wife and five children. How many of us could do the same?

Bob was generous with his stories. This was much to the chagrin of his smart and undersung spouse Mary, who sometimes had the “not-this-one-again” look of someone who had heard a story about “Lennie” [Bernstein] or “Arthur” [Miller] one too many times. I do remember a tale about a harrowing night when the Japanese broke through the American lines where he was directing a band in the Aleutians, and some witty chats over dinner with his Crucible librettist Bernard Stambler.

For most of us in opera, to get a single piece into the standard operatic repertoire would be considered a lasting and major accomplishment. There are plenty of examples of that—The Merry Widow, Pagliacci, La Giaconda—to name a few. Clearly The Crucible is going to remain a cornerstone of the American opera repertoire, alongside Susanna, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and a few others. In addition to some of the most iconic characters in American opera, The Crucible has a sense of forward motion and sweep, which causes it never to be bogged down in a swamp of recitative.

Bob was very proud of the opera and posters of the Korean and German premieres (Die Hexenjagd!) used to hang on the walls of his studio. I know so many singers who have vivid memories of singing Tituba, John Procter, Abigail or Elizabeth Proctor that we could probably have a Crucible sing-along. Maybe we’ll do that sometime. The hymn in the show, “Jesus my consolation,” has taught more opera singers to sing in 7/8 than any other piece. His other operas deserve a second hearing, including Abelard and Heloise and his treatment of Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever which is a smart little chamber opera for four women.

Ward’s instrumental music is always idiomatic and well-wrought. Check out his Appalachian Ditties and Dances or his Raleigh Divertimento for wind quintet. There is a really charming young audiences piece for narrator and orchestra called Jonathan and the Gingery Snare which I remember Bob narrating with great enthusiasm. Although he had stopped writing operas, Bob continued to write instrumental music well into his nineties.

A less formal Robert Ward with Michael Ching in 2005.

Arts in the state of North Carolina is better for Bob Ward having been there. His involvement with the School of the Arts and, to a lesser extent, Duke, will be long remembered. He regularly served on national and state boards, prize committees, and music panels. In order to keep opera alive in central North Carolina, he co-founded and chaired the board of an opera company there, now absorbed into the North Carolina Opera. In this internet era where every tweet, blog, and post is an implied act of subtle self-promotion, he did the in-the-trenches work unsung, as a quiet steady duty.

In our final chat together last month, when we were making plans for me to come see him this July, I asked Bob about his relationship with the composer Douglas Moore. He said that Moore was an unusually generous colleague. That is an apt description for Bob, too.

*
Composer and conductor Michael Ching is now the chair of the Douglas Moore Fund, which provides an annual grant to an aspiring opera/music theater creator. His opera Speed Dating Tonight premieres this summer at Brevard.

Remembering Jeffery Cotton (1957-2013)

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Dan Coleman - Headlines, Memorials

[Ed. Note: The author would like to give special thanks to Karen Latuchie and Stacey Richter.]

Jeffery Cotton photo courtesy Dan Coleman

Jeffery Cotton—composer, entrepreneur, essayist, and fiction writer—succumbed to sudden cardiac death on February 4, 2013, two months before his 56th birthday.

He has left us with a trove of darkly hued, deeply lyrical works. His compositions can be heard as a film noir soundtrack that evokes the deceptively sunny Los Angeles of his childhood filtered through the haunted German expressionism he encountered as a student of Hans Werner Henze. But an artist’s life is not wholly contained in finished works. Throughout our two-decades-long friendship I admired Jeff for living a fully creative life.
BMI’s Ralph Jackson introduced me to Jeff at Chamber Music America’s annual conference in 1994. I was fifteen years younger, and just beginning graduate studies in composition.
I looked up to Jeff. By the time he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, he was among the most decorated young composers of his generation, having earned three BMI Student Composer Awards, a Fulbright Fellowship, the New York Youth Symphony’s First Music commission, and, in 1990, a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Even with this extraordinary validation of his musical talent, it was characteristic of him to remain independent by curtailing his search for an academic post and following his heart to New York City. To get by, he took a job as personnel manager for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and its associated Chamber Ensemble. Jeff’s compositional prowess became known within the organization, and he was promoted to composer-in-residence of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble.

Under the ensemble’s aegis he created and curated a new concert series called Second Helpings, based on the premise that a second performance is often more difficult to secure than a world premiere. Each concert was presented in an unconventional performance space, such as the Guggenheim Museum or Dia:Chelsea. With its reprise performances, the series helped sustain interest in many new chamber works and was praised by The New York Times.

Jeff’s achievements and trajectory were an inspiration to me. While there is a venerable tradition of composers serving simultaneously in administrative and artistic roles—from J. S. Bach as Kappellmeister for Prince Leopold, to Quincy Jones as vice president of Mercury Records, to William Schuman as president of Lincoln Center—it takes a resourceful and independent spirit to forge such a path outside of the academy.

I wanted to get to know Jeffrey Cotton, and see how he did it.

Fortunately, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble was scheduled to premiere Jeff’s new Trio for clarinet, cello, and harp soon after our initial meeting at the CMA conference, so I planned to attend.

On the date of the premiere performance—February 8, 1994—nine inches of snow fell on Manhattan. I made the treacherous hike from the 66th Street subway station to Merkin Concert hall in a sound-muffled city. Few people braved the elements and the concert was sparsely attended, but this gave it the feeling of being a semi-private event, which is perfect for chamber music.
Any piece of music—new or old—would be terrifyingly and unfairly paired with Schubert’s C major cello quintet, as Jeff’s Trio was that night. Nevertheless, I was deeply moved by Jeff’s piece, which went straight to the heart. I told him that this was the first time I’d heard a brand new piece of chamber music that fully deserved pride of place with the Schubert quintet.

As I got to know Jeff better, I learned how he developed such confidence as a composer. After important early studies with Daniel Kessner at Cal State Northridge, Jeff spent formative years as Hans Werner Henze’s apprentice in Berlin. Not only did Jeff receive traditional composition lessons from Henze, he also co-composed a film score and helped to orchestrate large sections of Henze’s Seventh Symphony. At first, I thought that Jeff’s own voice was a continuation of the post-Romantic line that stretched backward from Henze to Berg and Mahler. But I came to realize that Jeff was a quintessentially American composer who had made a kind of artistic “reverse commute” from America to Europe. Whereas Henze’s aesthetic forebears—such as Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Korngold—ended up in Hollywood, Jeff was raised in Los Angeles but sought the opportunity to live in Berlin, which was still shadowed by division and repression in the 1980s. At some subconscious level, and before it was fashionable, I believe that Jeff sought out the aesthetic world that great Hollywood composers like Max Steiner had left behind in Europe. Midcentury Los Angeles is always present in Jeff’s music, and even the ghosts of West Coast jazz are in evidence. For example, in his program notes for his Five Runic Songs, Jeff explicitly references “the style of trumpet playing in popular music of the 1940s and ’50s” in Hollywood, and the piece evokes the velvety, pensive approach made famous by Jack Sheldon and Chet Baker.

As he chose works for the Second Helpings series, and as he composed his own music, Jeff grappled with the problem of balancing artistic idealism and entertainment, and he was loath to pick sides. He was never at ease with what he understood to be an impatient dismantling of musical modernism in favor of simpleminded mass appeal. Jeff saw this as throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in a quintessentially American way. At the same time, he departed from modernist stereotypes by being keenly interested in communicating to his audience and to the musicians who interpreted his music.

His beautiful handwritten (and later, computer engraved) manuscripts were gratifying to instrumentalists, who immediately realized that he sympathized with them and that he wrote for their strengths. His appreciation for music’s graphic presentation even took the form of an intelligent and pointedly snarky essay on the state of notation software in the early 2000s. Jeff proudly noted that his rant attracted the respectful attention of the very company he chided, and that they rose to the occasion by improving their software in accordance with his constructive critique.

Jeffery Cotton. Photo by Honey Bunny, courtesy Dan Coleman.

Had Jeff been merely a composer who was frustrated with new technology, his essay might not have held sway with notation software programmers. But Jeff had special qualifications in the field of software development, which dated to his days as personnel manager for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

When he arrived at St. Luke’s, their roster of musicians and concert assignments was kept in a bulging three-ring binder. He taught himself an early database system known as Hypercard and singlehandedly created St. Luke’s first electronic database of musicians. As he approached the age of 40, Jeff sought opportunities for professional growth, and he parlayed his Hypercard skills into a new job as a programmer for a nascent electronic medical records company.

By this time, Jeff and I were close friends, and I grew concerned that his fulltime work as a programmer could cause him to lose touch with the classical music scene. I nominated him for the post of composer-in-residence for the Boston-based Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, a post he would hold from 1999 to 2003. He composed six new works for Metamorphosen, many of which have been widely performed elsewhere. One of these commissions, the Suite from Pyramus and Thisbe from 2002 (which had begun as a series of sketches made in Berlin while on his Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990), was recognized with the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jeff impressively maintained two parallel careers in composing and computer programming. His compositions of the early 2000s were championed by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Cypress String Quartet, and Tucson Symphony Orchestra. During the same years, he founded a web design and hosting company called Wired Musician, worked in the IT department of Deutsche Bank, and even participated in the “dot com” bubble as an IT employee of the ill-fated company Kozmo.com. It was all creative activity for Jeff, who was an independent dreamer, ceaselessly engaged in designing new worlds and solving problems.

When any artist acts with such astuteness and confidence, I have to wonder what motivates him. Ambition, in the positive sense of the word, seems to me one of life’s essential mysteries, but there were others in Jeff’s life as well.

When Jeff was in his thirties he discovered that he was half brother to the folk singer Tom Rush, and that his family’s history was more complicated than he had known. The maternal musical DNA shared by Jeff and Tom (their grandfather had been a successful big band leader) might warrant the further attention of genomic researchers, but it certainly solves the mystery for me: Jeff followed a deeply rooted path.

With music and computer programming under his belt, Jeff had turned his attention in recent years to writing fiction. The latter effort was cut short by his death. But in his nonfictional essays, many of which are published on his website, Jeff’s astuteness, integrity, and candor are always accompanied by his sardonic, infectious sense of humor.

Our conversations were always filled with laughter. When we last spoke, a week before he died, Jeff told me how much he loved the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird. He admired the adaptation of the novel, the acting of Gregory Peck, and most of all, Elmer Bernstein’s musical score.

“Except for all that xylophone,” Jeff said. And he followed up in an email:
“The xylophone should be illegal.”

Remembering Elliott Carter (1908-2012)

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Joel Chadabe - Articles, Commentary, Memorials

Helen and Elliott Carter in 1977. Photo courtesy of Joel Chadabe.

I think it was in the summer of 1958 that I attended the Aspen School of Music in Aspen, Colorado, high up in the Rocky Mountains. Darius Milhaud was the major composer-in-residence. Lukas Foss and Elliott Carter were composers-in-residence for a week or two during the festival. I may be leaving some things out and forgetting some of the people and some of the details, but I do remember two things with great clarity. One of them is my explorations of the mountains around Aspen on horseback, going off in a different direction several times a week with a fellow student–her name was Meg–on adventurous, exhilarating long rides, sometimes all day, feeling an extraordinary sense of freedom as we moved through a landscape alone on top of the world.

The other one is a workshop in percussion offered to the composers at the school by George Gaber, an exceptional percussionist then active in the New York music scene. At 8:00 in the morning, Gaber was there in the music performance tent, surrounded by an enormous number and variety of instruments from timpani to finger cymbals. A few composition students were there. So was Elliott Carter. To my pleasure and surprise, Carter dominated the conversation as Gaber went through the instruments, playing each one and demonstrating different techniques for playing them. Carter had brought a notebook with him. He asked a lot of questions and took copious notes. It occurred to me later that he had begun to think about the Double Concerto, finished in 1961, but at that time we—“we” being the students who were there–knew of Carter through his String Quartet No. 1. That a composer we respected as a leader in the avant-garde would come to a workshop with young students, ask questions that told us what he didn’t know, and take notes, was very impressive. But thinking back, my guess is that at that time in his career, he had achieved a level of self-confidence and comfort with what he was doing musically that allowed him to display without embarrassment what he didn’t know. Early on, he had actively sought public recognition for his Americana style, for example his early orchestral piece Pocahontas, but as he told me and, in fact, said in many interviews, he had reached a point where he realized that he hadn’t gotten anywhere and he decided to go off to the desert and work out his own ideas. His first realization of the new ideas was his String Quartet No. 1 which was widely recognized as a masterpiece, albeit a little-understood masterpiece. As a student, I followed him around a little bit at Aspen, and I vaguely recall that I asked him if I could study with him.

Well, I got my chance. In September 1959, I began the three-year master’s degree program at the Yale School of Music. Carter was there to teach in 1961 and 1962. His class was a seminar that met for a couple of hours every week. The four or five of us taking the seminar presented what we were working on. I remember writing a piano piece that had an unusual little figuration in it. I remember it because Carter said something to the effect of: “Hmmm, well, that seems to work very well, but I don’t see why it does.” His teaching was largely by critique and discussion of our work. His ongoing messages to us were to do things in the most interesting way and (I paraphrase this advice, given to young composers starting their careers) to follow our own ideas and not be swayed by the lure of an artificial public success. I do not recall that he ever discussed his own work with us, but he did play examples of works by other composers, especially works that he thought we didn’t but should know. He played and we discussed parts of Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître, for example, as well as “Improvisation sur Mallarmé” from Pli Selon Pli, and a piece by Gilbert Amy, a student of Boulez. He discussed the orchestration of these pieces. He presented many discussions of orchestration and orchestral sound in general, for which Carter pointed to examples in Mahler’s music where colors shift as instruments mix, and come and go, in the course of a single thread of melody. He was also interested in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and spent time trying to analyze it, but Stravinsky, who was a friend of Carter’s, apparently assured him that there was no underlying schemata. It’s interesting that Carter searched for an underlying schemata in The Rite of Spring, not something that would have occurred to me to do, for example, but the mainstream of music in the early 1960s was based on underlying structural procedures, as in Boulez’s and Babbitt’s serialism and Cage’s chance operations, and Carter was interested. His own compositions were organized by an underlying procedure based on chords and intervals. In fact, for a theory class at Yale, I did an analysis of Carter’s String Quartet No. 2, a piece that I have grown to know better as years go by and that I consider the first definitive expression of his musical ideas.

I graduated with an M.M. degree in 1962, the same year that President Kennedy was awarded an honorary doctorate, at which occasion he said, “Now I have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree.” In the fall of 1962, Carter went to Rome as the composer-in-residence at the American Academy. After a few adventures, as George Mully’s stage assistant in the chamber opera workshop at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art and as an employee for Poseidon Steamship Company (principal Mediterranean agent for the Turkish Maritime Lines) in Haifa, I ended up in Rome to study with Carter.

It was an absolutely wonderful experience from the beginning. I had made an appointment to meet him in Rome that October, and prior to my arrival he had found a place for me to stay, in a pensione in which harpsichordist Mariolina De Robertis lived. Partly through Mariolina, I met many composers in Rome, among them Franco Evangelisti, Aldo Clementi, Walter Branchi, many others. I also met John Eaton, who had strong ongoing ties with the American Academy, and Larry Austin, who was there for the year.

Carter was staying in a lovely small building used by guest composers at the American Academy, located outside of the Academy building and far from downtown Rome on the Gianicolo Hill. The living room was large with a grand piano on one side and a view of a lovely garden on the other. For my part, I was living a freelance musician’s life, copying and editing music, playing piano, managing somehow, and I was writing music. That winter of 1962 was the coldest ever. Not to be taken literally, the oldest man in town didn’t remember the last time that the water in the Fontana Barbarini had frozen. I was for the most part sitting at my desk, fingers frozen, wearing sweater and overcoat, composing. When I finished something, or when I felt I needed it, I called Carter, went to see him, and we spent an afternoon together, several hours, talking. We talked about my music, which I recall as helpful, insightful, and encouraging. But as I was becoming surer of what I wanted to do and as I was becoming clearer about how to do it technically, our conversations evolved into discussions of music in general. I thought it was wonderful. I loved the process of our conversations, the depth and breadth of Carter’s interests in literature and languages, and, in short, as I think back on those days, those conversations were so exceptional and I gained so much from them that I am left somewhat speechless in trying to characterize them. It was not like information that I could write down and walk away with. It was like growth. Carter must have enjoyed it as well or he wouldn’t have been so relaxed and talkative for so many hours at so many meetings. I was a young guy. He was thirty years older and he was sharing his thoughts. I also had some thoughts to share about music, opera, and literature. And now, especially as I reflect on those days, I think we were forming a friendship. I think it was sometime during that period that I began to call him Elliott.

The Carters at their home in Waccabuc, NY. Photo courtesy Joel Chadabe.

In 1964, the Ford Foundation started its residence program in Berlin and Elliott told me that he was going. I said, “How can I apply?” He said, “You’ve already applied. You’re going.” In fact, I made an early round trip. It was probably in October or November 1963 that Elliott asked and I drove his car to Berlin from Rome, then returned to Rome, then went to Berlin in January. Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski were also there, and Elliott and his wife, Helen, were very much a part of our lives in Berlin. I remember a performance of the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano, with Mariolina De Robertis playing harpsichord, Frederic Rzewski playing piano, and Bruno Maderna conducting. It was a bit of a nerve-racking experience for Elliott because Maderna missed the first rehearsal, showed up late to the second one, and when he did arrive he looked at the scores on the podium, turned to Frederic who was seated at the piano and asked, “Frederico, che facciamo?” Then, looking at the score, he said, more or less to himself, “Oh, I see, O.K., percussion up there (and he changed the percussion’s position onstage), let’s go,” and he started to conduct through the piece, learning it as he went, to the coda. “Hmmm,” he said, “one group is in 2, the other is in 3, I’ll have to conduct one group with my left hand and the other group with my right hand. But then, how will I turn pages? Ah, I’ll memorize the score.” At about that time, there was a problem with the harpsichord, so a technician from the harpsichord company was called in and he fixed it. Between Maderna’s irritating calm-and-in-control attitude and the harpsichord problem, Elliott seemed to be a little unnerved. I sat next to him during the performance, and when it was finished, as we were getting up to go back to greet the musicians, he asked, “How was it?” I told him that it was great. It was.

Elliott Carter with Benjamin Chadabe, 1977. Photo courtesy Joel Chadabe.

Back in the United States a year or so later, I joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Albany. I was traveling quite a bit, but of course I was in touch with Elliott and saw him fairly often. As those years passed, and as I become more involved in electronics, we talked more often about his music than mine. During those years, Elliott and Helen had a house on Lake Waccabuc in Westchester County, just north of New York City, and my wife and I, and eventually with my son, visited during the summers while they were there. We often went swimming in the lake. Elliott had a cabin on the grounds, which of course I visited to see his current work, which we talked about. I remember that on one of those occasions he was working on Concerto for Orchestra. He had thumbtacked all of the pages of the score around the room so that he could work on the beginning, then the end, then in the middle, and so on, always seeing the whole as he made the parts.

A structure is the relationship of the parts to the whole, and we usually think of structure as the backbone of a piece. The role of structure in many of Elliott’s works, however, is more in the presentation of the piece than its driving ideas. What drives the Concerto for Orchestra, for example, is the evolving interaction in the relationship between “personalities,” different characters or forces that are musically identified through orchestration as much as through the notes the instruments play. In composing the Concerto, and also in other works, Elliott thought of the forces in poetic as well as musical terms, as narratives, and narratives are by no means the sole domain of music. The forces in the Concerto for Orchestra, for example, are based on Vents, a poem by Saint-John Perse. It’s the forces of Perse’s winds that give us the spirit of the Concerto and the narrative of interaction between elements that becomes the long line of the composition. Elliott played through that interaction in his thoughts, then, when he found the best realization of the idea, he froze the thought in notation and presented it in a coherent structure.

Elliott’s music in general is a superb amalgam of the contemporary concept of music based on underlying process and the classical concept of structure and balance. It’s a superb generalization of narrative in literature and sound. Elliott has been a wonderful example of the composer as a knowledgeable, educated person with a broad-based understanding of things in addition to music.

I’ve seen Elliott many times in the past few years. He was composing and, fascinated with the language as well as the content, reading Proust. About a year ago, he declared “Enough Proust, no more Proust,” to my wife and I. When we saw him at a later visit, he said, “I’m back on Proust.” And during this time, although clearly growing weaker physically and tiring easily, he was composing many of the lighthearted and lovely short pieces that were perfectly performed at his 103rd birthday concert at the 92nd Street Y.

We attended the ceremony, on September 21, 2012, at the French Embassy Cultural Services building in New York, at which Elliott was appointed Commander in the Legion of Honor. It was a touching moment. And what a happy way to say goodbye.

The Carters and the Chadabes in 1995, photo courtesy Joel Chadabe.

[Ed. Note: In March 2000, NewMusicBox published an extensive conversation between Elliott Carter and Frank J. Oteri and in 2008, Phil Lesh of The Grateful Dead (a longtime Carter fan) talked with Carter for Counterstream Radio.]

Some Additional Memories from Jere Hutcheson

Joel Chadabe

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Some Additional Memories from
Jere Hutcheson