Category: Memorials

Maryanne Amacher in July 2009

On July 15, Maryanne Amacher fell on the campus of Bard College and suffered a head injury causing bleeding of the brain. Her friends from the area around Kingston, New York, and the Bard campus (where Maryanne had taught summer classes) including instructors such as Richard Teitelbaum and Bob Bielecki came to her aid, as they had done in the past. Her students from the master’s program made food and spent time with her in the hospital to make sure she was well taken care of and that the staff understood that she was a bit “special.” Her friend and the curator of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, Micah Silver, put together a way for Maryanne’s friends to communicate online, and her dear friend Robert The lead the charge in making sure her care was as good as possible and that her friends knew when visiting hours were. He essentially guided Maryanne from this realm to whatever waits beyond, with as much dignity and love as was possible.

Maryanne could be a challenging person in many ways. She lived in financial poverty in a massive three story home on 2.5 acres in Kingston, New York. The house was in such terrible repair that most of it was uninhabitable and it is probably not salvageable. She had boxes of papers piled almost to the ceiling in places. These boxes were full of ideas from projects past, present, and future. (Her work is thankfully being cataloged and rescued by Robert The and Micah Silver.) The main living space had blankets covering windows for insulation and dark areas of mold on the ceiling from years of water leaking in two stories above. A section of ceiling in the unused main parlor had fallen on a grand piano rendering it useless (or maybe prepared). She was both grateful for help repairing her house and might also get angry at you while doing work on it to make it livable (an ordeal I went through on a few occasions). It seemed to be a rite of passage for many of her friends to get yelled at while helping her. One always ended up a closer friend afterward.

A bank of old oscillators formed sort of a command central that was her mixing and music suite at the center of her living space. The music that came out of those speakers was unique and unlike any these ears had heard from any other composer. The volume could be deafening and seemingly emanate from different points at the same time. You might feel as if things were physically happening to the space around you, almost like beings were trying to emerge from the sounds. The volume levels could also be low and the effects calming as well. In this respect her music was much like she was, very loving and friendly or a bit of a firecracker.

Maryanne was her own artist and seemed to thrive best on her own. She was never easily pinned down with a group, although her creative environment included such artistic greats as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and David Behrman, to name a few, and she was a member of Musica Elettronica Viva in 1970. She has been cited by Rhys Chatham as one of his main influences and many artists talk about being profoundly affected by her work and ideas.

Maryanne lived in relative obscurity, lessened by the releases of two Sound Character CDs on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, as well as her writing in his Arcana series. There is also day trip maryanne, a film made with Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore that is available on Youtube, and which has helped bring her work to the attention of a new younger crowd. My sons and their friends in Detroit knew about her and had her Tzadik releases. A long overdue acknowledgment is beginning to emerge.

Maryanne was a wonderful friend in my life, and I will never forget her or her unique ways. We sat and spoke about sounds in her living room laboratory. Most recently we were thinking about and listening to the sounds made by the so-called “booming dunes,” sands dunes that create wonderful low frequency drones when triggered by small land or sand slides. She came to my son’s high school graduation party and ate a surprising amount for a woman who only tipped the scales at 85 pounds. All washed down with glasses of wine. She put on headphones and listened to a 76-minute long piece I had made around the low frequencies of explosions on the shore of the Hudson River in Kingston. She had trouble getting up on her own after listening, and her friend Jeffrey Benjamin who had brought her, had to help her get up. I was concerned about her waning strength. She fell one week later. No one knew the extent of her injuries, least of all Maryanne. She was determined to get out of the hospital and rehab centers and get back to work, even angrily referring to me and a few others as cowards for not picking her up and escaping out the window or down the hall in a laundry hamper with her. She was going to convert my house into a sound rehab center. She was not going down without a fight. Then the stroke came and she got quiet. Her friends kept coming and emailing to show their love and support, but she reached the end and at about 9:30 in the morning on October 22, 2009, Maryanne Amacher died.

I sent an email to John Zorn and he replied with a sentiment that seemed to sum up many people’s hopes for Maryanne: “god bless her…and may god grant her peace!”

Leon Kirchner, who died last week at the age of 90, was my teacher during the stormy years of the late sixties and early seventies. Somehow it still seems fitting that I should always associate my apprenticeship with him with that turbulent era, an era full of anxiety, restlessness, and ecstasy. Those are the words—anxiety, restlessness, and ecstasy—that pretty much sum up Leon’s music.

The first piece of his I recall hearing was his third string quartet, performed live at Sanders Theater in Cambridge sometime shortly after its premiere. The electronic sounds emerging from the speakers onstage sounded futuristic and appealingly alien, reminding me of sci fi movies. It was not however the electronic burbling coming from Buchla oscillators that mesmerized me but rather the mercurial, hyperlyrical writing for the string players. It was music of intense yearning, summoning an emotional world of extreme, at times unbearable intensity. I felt I was hearing music that was mature, difficult, and important, the same impression I’d received from my first exposure to the late Beethoven quartets.

Leon’s intellect was every bit as staggering as his emotional sensibilities. He relied greatly on these native instincts, instincts that made him a great teacher, able to spot weaknesses in another’s music. He had the capacity to articulate his impressions in what often could be devastatingly candid words. A bad encounter with him in the seminar room could require weeks for one to recover enough self-esteem to continue. But he was fundamentally a kind person, and those who knew him well stayed faithful to him to the end of his life.

I once wrote that I thought composing for Leon was “a ferocious wrestling match with inner demons.” The older I get, the more I realize that I was right, and that Leon was also right. Creativity IS a ferocious wrestling match. If it’s not, it’s unlikely to produce anything of much value. And value was what the experience of being around Leon was all about. He had no time for mediocrity or superficiality. In class we heard over and over about Bach and Schubert, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Dostoevsky and Mann. He had no toleration for intellectual posturing. Nothing angered him more than the artifice and gamesmanship of the academic serialists with whom he was often lumped together by careless critics and commentators. He was a deep soul, as those who came in contact with his fiery furnace can attest. I owe him much.

When I was informed of the passing of Leon Kirchner last week at age 90, my response was one of disbelief. I soon discovered when communicating with other mutual friends that this was a shared feeling. Yes I know, he had a “long, productive life,” “a good ride,” etc. But what a life force—and to the very end.

My relationship with Kirchner began in 1960 when a friend—Barbara Field, a publicist for the Boston Symphony—invited me to dinner in order to meet him. Leon was in Boston to conduct the BSO in one of his works and had agreed to teach at Tanglewood that summer. Barbara suggested I bring some of my music for Leon to peruse with the aim of seeing if he would accept me as a student at both Tanglewood and Mills College.

Leon Kirchner and Stanley Silverman (with broken arm*) at Tanglewood, summer 1960. (*The Tanglewood stair collapsed. Their insurance settlement paid for my Grad school.)

I remember him saying, “OK, but you are going to have to work very hard. Tell your parents that may mean on shabbas too!” Then he asked me what my aims were. I remember, to this day, answering: “Well, I just LOVE Rodgers and Hart (I still do) and would like to write a musical comedy.” Leon shot back: “You are still going to have to work hard, expand your technique and then you will be able to write a better musical comedy.”

The experience at Mills was amazing: studies with Leon and Darius Milhaud. Socially it was pure Woody Allen—a boy from The Bronx thrust into a Bay Area women’s college. (The Graduate School was co-ed. There were three of us guys, one married.) Leon’s teaching studio doubled as his composing site when not used for class. He often worked in tennis whites, cigar in mouth. It was a lovely space with a shiny terra-cotta floor, surrounded by wild vegetation, not unlike a suite at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. Of great annoyance to him, but to the delight of the students, a resident peacock would appear at the window in full plumage and shriek in ecstasy whenever Leon played the piano.

Kirchner was an inspiring teacher, almost Talmudic in his dedication. The wide range and pure variety of the composers and musicians who were fortunate enough to study with him and pursue careers of great individuality should serve as testimony to this. Those of us who loved him were aware of the toll his commitment to teaching over three decades took on his composing time.

After graduation, the same time he moved to Harvard, Leon generously agreed to my continuing working with him privately in Cambridge. He also sponsored my application for a Guggenheim Fellowship and, true to his word, arranged for me to meet some of his “industry” friends in Hollywood, an impressive assortment of actors, musicians and—would you believe—Arnold Schoenberg’s widow, Gertrude.

Through the ensuing years our families became close. I would stay with the Kirchners whenever I had concerts or “out-of-town” previews of plays in Boston as well as performing with Leon frequently as a guitarist at Harvard and Marlboro. The Kirchners, in turn, would stay with us in the Berkshires.

Those days were punctuated by a lot of hard work but also included some hilarious episodes. One time, when I was teaching at Tanglewood, Leon called me in a panic from Marlboro saying he had programmed Les Noces, and had great pianists but no presentable chorus. Could I help? I managed to round up a fine chorus and in a rented van we rehearsed all the way from Lenox to Marlboro.

Another highlight was the time we invited Paul Simon and Leon to dinner because Paul was having a problem with a new song. The two huddled and identified the passage in question and Leon asked Paul what his goal was. Paul answered: “to make this a hit.” The song was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Now Leon had a streak of endearing innocence and at the time did not have much knowledge of pop music. He called me a few days later to report his students’ jaw-dropping response to the episode.

During the past year I have had the pleasure of spending some time with Leon’s oldest friend, Carl Reiner. Army buddies since WW II, Carl tells of Leon’s life in the military as a supply officer in charge of assigning jeeps. Apparently, as Carl tells it, Kirchner was ordered to write a score for a camp production of Frankenstein. Leon added the camp’s soprano to the orchestra who, as Reiner relates, let out a high “C” scream at the sight of the monster. This effect in tandem with, one could imagine, Leon’s signature expressionistic language sent shivers of horror down the spines of the audience made up of the soldiers of “Our Greatest Generation.”

When Leon moved to New York a few years back we became close again. He and his dear companion Sally Wardwell would particularly enjoy our annual birthday outings to the Soho House in Chelsea. He became interested and enjoyed the music making of his gifted daughter Lisa as well as his son Paul’s art work. Always the teacher, Kirchner turned his physical therapy sessions into discussions of the therapist’s art.

I had the privilege of spending a day with Leon a few weeks’ back when he played a recording of his early first piano concerto, with himself as the soloist. It was dazzling, fully formed “Kirchner” and informed by the most beautiful piano playing.

Kirchner’s music was hard for his students to analyze. It was structurally rigorous but like a star burst it would explode in its own individual way as if the form couldn’t hold the content. His piano playing was explosive too. I would compare it to Art Tatum. (Leon would often grouse about “notation being a big problem”.)

My favorite quote of Kirchner to his students: “Remember, the most important thing about the Bach Chorales is how beautiful they are. Study them and try to find out what makes them beautiful.”

Well, so long Lukas Foss, so long George Perle, and to you Leon, dear teacher and friend, it’s been grand!

Dina Koston (1940-2009)

Dina Koston was an extraordinary pianist as well as a composer and the creator of the Theater Chamber Players, a Washington, D.C.-based ensemble specializing in chamber music concerts that combined established repertoire with contemporary works and performed regularly at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She died in April after a long illness. On Saturday, August 29, her friends and colleagues gathered at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, for a memorial concert of both her music and music she loved.

The great pianist and co-director of the Theater Chamber Players, Leon Fleisher, played her elegant piano work Messages and the members of the Cygnus Ensemble joined with Theater Chamber Players to premiere her last finished work, Distant Intervals, an inventive and powerful piece filled with her distinctive sense of color, harmony, and an obsessive use of instruments within given registrations. She was a passionate person and voiced her opinions freely, which for some made her a difficult and complicated person to interact with. She certainly was that, but her passion for music was also infectious, her heart a big one when she cared about you, and her ear was, without a doubt, one of the greatest the American music scene has known. Her friend Wayne Shirley, a senior music specialist (emeritus) at the Library of Congress, told a story at the memorial about Koston coming into the Library to look at the original score of Pierrot Lunaire because she suspected some wrong notes in the edition. Shirley was not surprised that most of the nine suspect notes were in fact wrong, nor that she had surmised already what the right notes were.

I remember long discussions about why some composer’s music sounded “right” to her and others sounded “off”. When she was especially enthusiastic about something she would say “Far freakin’ out” with a big smile on her face.

Her enthusiasm for music stretched to finding and supporting the music of her peers, as well as younger composers, and that’s how I entered Dina’s life. A fellow composer sent Dina some of my music, and within weeks I received a call from her. She wanted to program my work Fable with TCP (although she insisted on calling that work Fables throughout the fifteen years I knew her), but it needed a conductor and that wasn’t going to work for this particular concert. Instead she programmed a string trio, and there I was months later, a young composer having my first work performed by her amazing colleagues at the Kennedy Center. In the decade to come they commissioned and premiered two more of my works and for a time I became a small adjunct part of this phenomenal musical family.

My friendship with Dina grew. We talked by phone every month, discussing everything from her love of Chopin and Webern to whatever work she was currently working on. In the last several years, Dina suffered many setbacks. The first was the death of her beloved husband Roger, a wonderful fellow and well-known psychoanalyst in D.C., and then her own health started to fail.

I saw Dina a couple of months before she died. She looked weak and I suspected that she might not have long to live, but when she talked about her new work Distant Intervals, the passion welled up. For those of us who were lucky enough to know her and learn from her, she will be greatly missed. She truly was “far freakin’ out,” in the best possible sense.

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Laura Elise Schwendinger

Laura Elise Schwendinger is an Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also the Artistic Director of the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Her compositions include Chiaroscuro Azzurro, a concerto for violinist Jennifer Koh and the International Contemporary Ensemble, which was commissioned by Miller Theater of Columbia University, and a setting of in Just- spring which has been performed on tour by Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish at venues including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, the National Arts Center in Canada and at the Tanglewood and Ojai Music Festivals. The first composer to win the American Academy in Berlin Prize fellowship, Ms. Schwendinger was recently honored with a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Merce Cunningham
Photo: Annie Leibovitz

[Ed. Note: While Merce Cunningham was and will remain an icon of contemporary dance, he will be remembered fondly in the new music community for his lifelong collaboration with John Cage as well as for commissioning musical works from a very wide range of composers—in fact, Cunningham commissioned more music for dance than anyone else in the 20th century. One of the most unusual scores created for Cunningham in recent years was the score for eyeSpace, for which audience members were given iPods to listen to during the performance, each with a different soundtrack. That score was created by Mikel Rouse who knew Cunningham for many years before they worked together on that project. So we asked Rouse to write a personal reminiscence.—FJO]

Having been among the last composers to collaborate with choreographer Merce Cunningham, I’ve been reflecting over these past days on the impact Merce has had on me both personally and professionally. Certainly, there are a number of living composers/collaborators who had a longer history of working with Merce. Takehisa Kasugi, John King, Christian Wolff, and David Behrman instantly come to mind but the list is long and varied, from Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars to Radiohead and Sonic Youth. My own story with Merce started as a friendship and turned into a number of wonderful collaborations, experiences, and life altering moments, which I’m only now beginning to fully appreciate.

I first met Merce through Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust. I had met Merce a number of times through my wife Lisa Boudreau, a 14-year veteran of the company (Lisa and I even met at a Merce Cunningham benefit in 1997). But it was my friendship with Laura that introduced me as an artist to Merce, and we started sharing dinners and conversation at Merce’s place on a regular basis.

Merce was a great storyteller and while many people would know his iconic stories, it was all the more powerful to hear it from Merce himself. For instance: how John Cage discovered macrobiotic cooking from Yoko Ono. Or his fond memories of touring with his company in an old VW bus (which John bought for the company using his winnings from a game show; his topic? Mushrooms). Far too many wonderful evenings to recount here, but I’ll never forget when Margaret Selby arranged with Laura to have the legendary Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones over to Merce’s for dinner. Margaret was working on a documentary of Chuck Jones. It’s impossible for me to describe what it was like to see these two men finding common ground in their work and interests. It was a truly memorable night that ended with Chuck drawing a picture of Bugs Bunny (in a tutu) in my sketchbook.

Ultimately, Lisa was invited into the mix, and it became a kind of extended family. Over the last decade we spent almost every Thanksgiving and Christmas at Merce’s—more holidays than we ever got to spend with our actual families. And over many dinners I met folks like collaborators Charlie Atlas, Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg; composers Pia Gilbert, Daniel Lentz, and Charles Amirkhanian, and various luminaries in the arts including Betty Freeman, Alex Ross, Marguerite Roeder, and Larry Larson to name a few.

Between Lisa and Laura, I found myself tagging along with the Cunningham Company on as many tours as I could when I wasn’t on the road with my own work. It was revelatory seeing pieces such as Ocean, Biped, and CRWDSPCR numerous times. Often we would all go out to dinner, and while Merce always brought his own meal (because macrobiotic cooking was hard to find on the road), he was delighted when a good cous cous restaurant could be found (close enough I suppose). Without Cunningham, Paris wouldn’t have become our second home. Without Cunningham, I wouldn’t have met the wonderful Bénédicte Pesle and Julie George. Without Cunningham, I wouldn’t have had a willing and able cast for the film portion of my own piece, The End Of Cinematics (shot in Paris with many of the dancers on location). This started collaboration with many of the dancers in the company and culminated in their involvement with the iPod score I would eventually create for Merce, International Cloud Atlas, for 2006’s eyeSpace.

From about 1998 to the present, Merce kindly attended almost every performance I did. But it was a performance in 1998 by the Alvin Ailey Company at City Center of Ulysees Dove’s Vespers (using my LinnDrum percussion score Quorum) that prompted Merce to tell me we would one day work together. But the nepotism factor was high and I resigned myself to not reminding Merce of his offer, hoping against hope that he’d file it away for the right moment.

In the meantime, I had been commissioned by the John Cage Trust to realize/compose a sound score for Cage’s James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, which would embark on a six-month tour beginning at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. For the performance, Merce played Eric Satie with Cunningham archivist David Vaughn in the role of Marcel Duchamp. I performed the sampling “sound effects” keyboard while playing the role of James Joyce.

Prior to the tour, the core group of performers would often meet for readings of the script at the Cunningham studios or at Merce’s apartment. These were great opportunities to see Merce’s wit and delight with his character. It was amazing to everyone how his unaffected reading of Satie suited the role. In the course of these rehearsals, I also had the opportunity to work with both Merce and Jasper in the recording studio. It was truly special to have the recorded voices of John Cage, Jasper Johns and Merce realized in the same piece.

When the performers for Alphabet arrived in Berlin on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, we all got the news of what was happening in New York on our hotel televisions. Berlin was mad with sirens and blockades, but we forged ahead with that night’s first rehearsal with the local cast under Laura’s direction. I remember seeing Merce sitting in the wings alone rehearsing his lines, and I went over to see how he was doing. I’ll never forget what he said to me: “Aren’t we lucky we have this to do.”

In fact, my fondest memories of Merce were just those kind of small and simple exchanges over numerous glasses of wine at his apartment. His stealth and resolve were constant inspirations to me as I tried to maintain my life and work in a city that was increasingly less creative and tied to the arts. I remember being nominated for an award that I ultimately didn’t get. I was bummed out and, looking for any possible rationalization, I told Laura that maybe not getting the award meant I was still ahead of the curve. When she told Merce this story he laughed and replied: “Oh, he’ll be fine.” I know it’s a small thing, but coming from him it really meant the world to me.

In 2005 I was approached by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to compose a piece of music for iPods. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to employ the “shuffle” characteristic of the iPod as a compositional device, thereby allowing each audience member to have his or her own unique sequence of the score. I saw this as homage to the aesthetic of chance operations pioneered by John Cage and Merce (in particular the idea that music, choreography, and décor could be created independent of one another). I told Merce it was like Cage/Cunningham on steroids and he laughed at that.

I also wanted to include all the dancers in the recording of the iPod score. The dancers contributed vocal, instrumental, and spoken word performances. I am extremely grateful for the creativity and enthusiasm that the dancers brought to these recording sessions. I think it was the second night after we opened at the Joyce that I learned that Merce was chuckling in the wings with earbuds in place listening to the score. In typical form, he told me it was “marvelous.” After wondering for almost ten years if I’d ever get to do a score for Cunningham, it was Lisa who summed up the irony of it all best: “Great, you do a score for iPods and I [as well as the other dancers on stage] don’t even get to hear it.”

One of my fondest memories of touring eyeSpace with the Cunningham Company was being invited to Rauschenberg’s studio in Captiva for a picnic. After plenty of wine and food, the dancers did an impromptu performance on the grass outside of the studio. It was beautiful to see Merce and Bob sitting together watching, almost as if it were for the very first time. Bob’s assistants and staff were the kindest hosts and before we left they measured the ring finger of each person for rings using the titanium material that Bob had used in his latest series called “Runts”. Then they soldered the rings together and sent them to us in NY. I’ve never taken mine off.

On a recent occasion, I went to Merce’s for dinner knowing he was having a difficult time with his newest piece, Nearly Ninety. It was a good opportunity to let him know how his good humor and counsel had helped me through some tough times. He responded by saying, “Now maybe we’ll help each other.”

When I went for dinner for the last time, I told Merce I would send him an IOU for all the wine I drank at his house. He laughed. Lisa and I sat with him, the three of us each with a glass of wine to toast our coming together. Laura was in the wings, preparing some food and managing the unmanageable. This was a few days before Merce passed away and we all knew it was probably the last time we’d be together like this. And for that brief moment, we were all present.

As I’m writing my thoughts are with the dancers, the musicians, the staff at the Cunningham Dance Foundation and all the collaborators and friends. I’m wishing them all the best as they move forward in their creative lives. And I’m thinking we are all one very lucky group of people.

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Mikel Rouse

Mikel Rouse is a New York-based composer, director, performer, and recording artist. His works include 25 records, seven films (among them Funding and Music For Minorities), and a trilogy of media operas: Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland, and The End Of Cinematics. His new CD Gravity Radio will be released this fall. Mikel Rouse’s music is available on iTunes.

[Ed. Note: American composer and educator Doanld Erb (January 17, 1927-August 12, 2008), a former president of the American Music Center’s board of directors and a recipient of the AMC’s Letter of Distinction, meant a great deal to many of us here at the AMC. Upon learning of Erb’s death earlier this week, we asked composer Margaret Brouwer, a one-time Erb student and a lifelong friend, to share her thoughts about him and his compositional legacy. —FJO]

Donald Erb (1927-2008); Photo courtesy Theodore Presser Co.

I remember the first time I heard Don Erb’s music in a live performance, before I had ever met him. The concert was at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he would begin teaching the next year. There was no lighting in the auditorium except a strobe light illuminating what seemed like thousands of painted ping pong balls and streamers flying through the auditorium to his wild and wooly music, Souvenirs. This was the first side of Don that many saw—the outrageous, the over-the-top, thumbing his nose at convention. But that was just the beginning. Soon, the deep compassion—and anger at injustice—that was Don Erb showed in his person, and his music.

Those of us who were Don’s students knew him not just as a creative and forceful composer, but also as a man of deep emotions and compassion. Along with standing for individualism, creativity, and uniqueness, Don was all about honoring and helping those plagued with misfortune. He hurt for the world and its problems. It tore him up inside. He was a critic of everything in the world that did not stand for the noble, the honorable, and the helping spirit. He showed no fear about saying exactly what he thought, bucking the establishment, and showing noisy displeasure when something in the world was wrong. At the same time, he was extremely supportive of his students and quite indulgent with their less stellar sides. He would flail out at the world, but seldom at a student. When he did say something less-than-kind to a student in a moment of rage, he would apologize later explaining how it was said out of his own problems at the moment rather than directed personally toward the student.

We saw his anguish when he told us about the experience he had had when serving in the Navy on the USS Baltimore at the end of World War II. He saw Hiroshima soon after the atomic bomb had destroyed it. In later years, this experience seemed to occupy his mind, and he frequently talked very emotionally about it. I believe that this experience strongly influenced the music he wrote throughout his life. He was consumed by his anger at a world where this terrible event could happen, his helplessness to make things better for the innocent, burned, and blinded children and mothers—but also his anger at their country for the attacks, some of which he had personally experienced on his ship. This complex mixture of anger, guilt, compassion, and love of people are the emotional elements in his music.

We, his students saw this compassion constantly—for myself, his concern when my husband was near death in the hospital, and he and his wife, Lucille, were ready to make a ten-hour drive to be there for us. He kept up with all of his students, knew what they were doing, and was always ready to hear the latest music they had composed or help with any personal problems they were experiencing. In Texas, we watched his anguish and fear when Lucille, his true soul mate and the person to whom he was deeply and completely devoted, was in the hospital having heart surgery.

Don lived by an astute intuition in dealing with people, and also in composing music. He had an excellent feeling for pacing, and for drama. He felt the music physically. I remember many times in lessons as he went through the score of what I was writing. He would become more and more physically involved, growing tense as the tension grew in the music. He would begin to move with it, leaning forward, willing it to grow. When he did not have this reaction and simply said, “Hmm, not bad,” I went home and rewrote!

When teaching, I found myself quoting Don to my students. Does the music move me to a deep emotion: anger, shock, grief, love? Does the music pull me along without allowing my mind to wander? Do new events happen exactly where they should so the musical flow makes sense in the overall shape? And direct quotes: “It doesn’t matter which pitches you use, just use the right ones!” “Never be afraid to take chances, even if you fall flat! That’s how you grow as a composer and contribute to the art.”

As much as he was the antithesis of a conservative person, Don was an adamant supporter of family values, and a religious person—however unconventional. He was a strong advocate of marriage and fidelity, which he unabashedly promoted to all of his students. He was married to Lucille for 58 years and is survived by her as well as four children and nine grandchildren.

While being very much a critic of the materialistic world, Don loved people. He loved to be around people and to find out about them. He started conversations with anyone he met, and asked personal questions. He loved to “hang out” with friends and former students over a glass (or two or three) of wine or bourbon, and was deeply loved by many people. He was a strong father figure for almost all of his students, and even for the students of his students. Many people leaned on him. Looking back now, it is amazing that he could be such a tower of strength for so many people. But his strength was grounded in a true partnership with a strong and devoted wife whom he deeply loved, and upon whom he depended and leaned.

Don’s music is controversial, uncompromising, powerful, emotional, and very personal. He wrote over 100 works, 25 of which are works for orchestra. His knowledge and use of orchestral instruments, and of the orchestra itself as an instrument, was comprehensive and savvy. He was an extremely intelligent man and a musician with vast knowledge who seemed almost to make it a point not to play that role, except occasionally. He received awards from the Rockefeller, Ford, Guggenheim, Kulas, Koussevitzky, Fromm, and Aaron Copland foundations, as well as the Prix de Rome. He was president of the American Music Center from 1981 to 1984 and received AMC’s Letter of Distinction in 2001. He served as composer-in-residence with the Dallas and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras.

Don was a maverick composer. He ignored the conventions of the day in the world of composition. He followed his intuition and his heart. He was a giant as a person, and wrote “giant” music—bigger than life, emotional, outrageous, beautiful, and heartrendingly expressive, sometimes in a strong, in-your-face way. He was all about feeling and emotion. Don Erb devoted his life to music, to Lucille, to people, and to his students.

[Ed. Note: For the past week, the new music community has been reeling from the sudden suicide of Jorge Liderman, composer and professor of music at UC Berkeley. Jorge will continue to live through his remarkable music which seemed at the cusp of reaching a broad audience. His extensive discography remains a tribute to his life and work. Below are a series of memories and tributes by students, colleagues, and friends. If you would like to add something here, please write us. —FJO]

Eliane Aberdam

Jorge Liderman (1957-2008)

I studied composition with Jorge in 1994-1995 and in 1997-1998. He was both a friend and a teacher, and I felt especially connected because we shared many things in common, such as our undergraduate studies at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and the influence of Jewish tradition in our music.

The first words that come to mind when I recall his teaching are respect, integrity, and care. Jorge respected my music and my musical ideas, and in return, I not only respected him as a teacher, but his teaching has proved extremely valuable to my music. I recall one lesson in particular, and I would like to share it as an example of his teaching.

I was working on the middle movement of a large orchestral piece, trying to figure out which musical process(es) I would use to get from an oboe ostinato to a climax point for the whole orchestra in about 45 measures. When it was time for the lesson, I hadn’t made a choice yet and had multiple processes going on at the same time in my score, none of them leading through. As I showed Jorge my work, he exclaimed: “This is a mess, but this ostinato is great.” Then I explained to him what it was I wanted to achieve. And instead of sending me home with a “clean-that-up-and-come-back-next-week,” he spent the entire session working with me on the score, as if the score was his no less than mine. In one hour, he helped me do what would have taken me a week to figure out, caring for me and my music, and being honest with the organization of the score. All the while he was pointing out the musical ideas that he liked.

In my creative work, I often use techniques I learned from Jorge’s teaching. I also try my very best to treat my own students in the same way I was treated by Jorge, as well as teaching them the very valuable tools I learnt 10 to 12 years ago. And I will continue to do so as a continuous tribute to Jorge.

Fernando Benadon

Around ten years ago, Jorge Liderman refined the language that he had been tweaking for some time. Being his student meant for me absorbing parts of that language, from the more conceptual (processes, surprises, letting go) to the more concrete (off-accents, modes, milongas). But if I stopped composing today and had no more use for these things, I would hope to live by Jorge’s true teaching: that you stick to what works for you, downplay the trends, make no apologies, and get to work.

Miguel Chuaqui

I don’t qualify as a student of Jorge’s, since by the time Jorge arrived at UC Berkeley I was finishing my Ph.D. with Andrew Imbrie, and I never took a class, etc. with Jorge. But I did spend a little time with him.

In particular, I remember when we both had works being played in Sacramento in the mid-1990s, and I caught a ride with him from Berkeley. I was having trouble with my dissertation, and he simply asked me, “Pero, cómo es?” (“But, what’s it like?”). Actually trying to explain my dissertation to him in Spanish words was helpful, and it “gave me permission” to talk about Neruda and Latin American influences on my music, which I was loathe to do in English, because I really disliked, at the time, being labeled as anything (including “a Latin American” composer). I also mentioned that I was teaching harmony at Laney College in downtown Oakland while finishing my Ph.D. and he said that he had taken a carpentry class there. When I asked why, he said “Me gusta trabajar con las manos” (“I like to work with my hands”). For some reason, I felt that I knew him better when he said that.

Anthony De Ritis

Jorge Liderman was my composition teacher, dissertation advisor and weight-lifting buddy for four years at the University of California, Berkeley (between 1993 and 1997). I think of Jorge Liderman as one of the three important teachers that I’ve had. Ten years after graduating from Berkeley, I find myself utilizing his process methods in order to stimulate my thinking, and to get out of a compositional bind. What I appreciated most was that Jorge taught composition from practice, technique and method; not from subjectivity and vanity. He did not treat me as a disciple, rather a partner sharing an investigation—he taught me how to evaluate a compositional context and he gave me a bag of tools with which I could survive the trek.

Jorge’s birthday, November 16, was the same day as my PhD orals, so I never forgot it, and I always called him on that day to celebrate both events. I’m a violinist and violist, and he often asked me about my opinion regarding a particular string passage that he composed, “Can I do this?” he would ask… His ego didn’t require that he was always the teacher and I, the student. I carry this spirit with me when I teach my composition students today at Northeastern University—from now on November 16 will be a day of rememberance.

Richard Dudas

Although I never took individual composition lessons with Jorge, my very first class when I entered Berkeley for grad school was his Ligeti seminar. Although I was apprehensive about going back to school to do a grad degree, his course and teaching methodology reassured me that I had made the right decision—he had us analyze the material from a very musical point of view, and always treated us as esteemed younger colleagues and fostered a friendly and relaxed class atmosphere. It became surprisingly easy to make the effort to wake up early on Monday mornings knowing that discovering new music and new ways of looking at that music were awaiting me in his seminar. His enthusiasm for the music we were studying definitely rubbed off on me. I finished the course a real fan.

Evelyn Ficarra

Jorge Liderman

My last composition lesson with Jorge Liderman was on January 31 of this year. Sadly, it was only my second lesson with him, as we had only just started to work together. I came into his office late, flustered, spilling over with scores and recordings, and he sat patiently while I pulled myself together, asking sympathetically what my schedule was like this semester, smiling a little at my evident disarray. Jorge had seemed to me to be introverted and at a low ebb when I had encountered him in recent weeks, so I was pleased at how engaged he was during lessons; quiet, focused, perceptive, a superb listener, a swift understanding of what I was getting at even if I hadn’t got there. His insights, whether technical or more structural/philosophical, were telling and will continue to feed my work. At one point he said, “It seems that all the players are each in their own world, and I am not sure of the significance when they come together.” This seemed to me an acute observation, with resonance for me beyond the piece, beyond music even. The hour passed swiftly, and I was reluctant to have to go to my next commitment. Both lessons ended with one of us saying, “See you next week.” I was looking forward to our continued conversations. My encounters with him were significant, and I am grateful for them.

Georg Hajdu

I must have been Jorge Liderman’s first graduate student in composition at UC Berkeley. I met Jorge soon after my arrival to the Bay Area in the fall of 1990. This was probably shortly after he had been hired as an assistant professor himself. When I introduced myself he asked me whether I was related to André Hajdu, the Israeli composer whom he had met during his composition studies with Mark Kopitman. My positive answer might have helped to establish a rapport which eventually led me to choose him in 1992 as my private instructor after doing composition seminars with Andrew Imbrie and John Thow (all of which, sadly, have died within one year).

I recall my first lesson with him: After I walked into the room, he pulled this little tray out of the green industrial-strength metal desk that all offices of the Berkeley music professor were outfitted with (it’s a public school after all), prompting me to place my music there. This was strange, as—after dozens of lattes and burritos as well as many games of racket ball—I realized that he was my professor after all. After I pointed this out jokingly, he immediately kicked the habit, so our lessons continued as if among equals. This is where his pedagogical strength lied: Being a sincere person, he never pretended that he knew all the answers; instead of giving recipes, he listened to his students and tried to understand their compositional motivations to find answers from within their system—even if this style or approach was foreign to him. When I presented a sketch that lacked a certain density, he suggested I create a second process to control the compositional surface structure, and this made it work. In 1993, after my orals, I told him I was going to write an opera as my dissertation. He immediately got excited about the idea (calling it “very ambitious”), and supported it as much as he could. Any other reaction could have been detrimental in this critical phase.

Jorge was also instrumental in orchestrating György Ligeti’s visit to Berkeley in 1993. After it became obvious that the music department didn’t have the funds to support a performance of Ligeti’s first piano etudes by Volker Banfield, Jorge approached Robert Cole of CalPerformance and found an ideal partner in him. Ligeti finally came to Berkeley and left a lasting impression. As with Henze, Ferneyhough, and Steve Reich, Jorge was attracted by great composers as well as by the quality they represented, and sought their friendship.

We continued being friends even after I had moved back to Germany. I also remember a visit to California when we met in a café in North Berkeley: He told me that he hadn’t been feeling too good recently and needed to see a doctor; a little later I learned from my friend Tony De Ritis with whom Jorge had gone to the gym practically every day for a long time, that he had stopped teaching in the middle of the semester and had gone on sick leave. I suspect that this was already a symptom of the condition that would take his life on February 3, 2008. Sadly, we lost touch with each other a year after I assumed my new job at the Hamburg music school in 2002. The last time I saw him fleetingly was at Peet’s coffee on 4th street a couple of years ago. He asked to call him on my next trip to California. This would have been in four weeks…

Jeremy Hunt

As a teacher he challenged me. One lesson remains most vivid. After showing him the beginnings of a rather banal piece, he became very animated and chose some well placed expletives to emphasize his criticisms. It shocked me from the droopy attitude that I had assumed in the few months preceding. I learned again that composition is hard and demanding and that is why I love it. Composers have to embrace the struggle. Jorge knew it and taught it. I am glad that I can call him teacher.

Brian Kane

I am terribly saddened by the sudden death of Jorge Liderman. I want to express my concurrence of feeling with all the composers who studied with him and knew him as a friend, to his current students and colleagues who will miss him terribly, and especially to his wife, Mimi.

When I was a much younger composer, Jorge was a tremendous beacon of support, who encouraged me in ways that, without exaggeration, simply changed my life. When I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Jorge was my harmony teacher for four semesters. He was a wonderful teacher of harmony and counterpoint, as any of his pupils could attest. But the day that remains the most clearly impressed was a day where we did no classroom work, but listened, as a group, to Antigona Furiosa. If I recall, Jorge had just won a significant German prize for that work, and he simply played the piece for us. For those who know this striking work, you will have no trouble understanding the impact it made.

A few years later, I found myself (a dedicated jazz musician) getting interested in composition, and I ran into Jorge at a concert. Almost on a whim, I naively asked if he taught privately. This initiated a long course of study with Jorge, where I had the privilege of becoming familiar with his musical mind through his insightful criticism, his ruthless editing of the extraneous, his love of formal organization and perceptible processes, his wit, and his musical intelligence. He introduced me to many of his favorite pieces and composers. I recall an analysis of Ligeti’s 10 Pieces for Wind Quintet where he nonchalantly pointed out it’s features, which both spoke to his intense appreciation of the music of others and his uncanny gifts at analysis—a skill to which he so rarely drew attention.

He invited me to sit in on his seminars, helped me find musicians to perform my student works, and even gently pulled me back to UC Berkeley, encouraging me to apply as a graduate student, eventually chairing my dissertation (perhaps a small case of “in my beginning is my end”). Once, I recall him suddenly asking me in the middle of a lesson, “Are you Jewish?” Puzzled, I hesitated to reply, “Yes.” “Good,” he laughed, “Now we can speak freely!”—a joke he later told me that Ralph Shapey had pulled on him. But, of course, being Jewish really had nothing to do with it. Jorge’s gift as a teacher, as other students will similarly attest, was his ability to show you how to speak freely as a composer, following the inner demands that make all of us pursue this bizarre and complicated form of life.

Those inner demands obviously led Jorge down a variety of paths. His music traversed a course of radical transformation over the decade in which I knew him well, from the political allegory of Antigona Furiosa to the lavish exuberance of The Song of Songs, littered along the way with small, fascinating works like his melancholic Chaconne for vibraphone, piano, and cello. His music often retrieved from the musical past ideas and structures to be re-thought and re-invented in the present, like Hoquetus, Ut Re Me Fa Sol La or, in a different manner, his settings of Sephardic and Jewish melodies. I always felt that this demonstrated more than simply musical intelligence but rather a tremendous love of music, in all of its social and historical breadth.

But the same demands also led in other, perhaps unspeakable directions. While being so generous, Jorge could also be so incredibly reserved. If Jorge, without cliché, let his music speak for him, how could we have not heard the message it was telling us? I doubt that anyone realized the depths of his sorrow.

Jorge, I am grateful to have known you, and I’ll miss you.

Keeril Makan

Jorge Liderman

In 2001, I was asked to write a letter describing my experiences studying with Jorge for a promotion case at UC Berkeley:

Professor Liderman has the uncommon ability to look at a student’s score and determine where the composer has not been self-critical enough. By being able to recognize the potential of one’s materials and learning how to make the most of them, Professor Liderman sets the student on to his or her own compositional path. In addition to the knowledge of how to take one’s compositional ideas and exploit them to their fullest, he is able to provide the student with the technical skills necessary to write the music envisioned.

In my case, I came to study with Professor Liderman at a time when I had a notion as to what sort of aesthetic I was interested in exploring, but without a clear idea of how to go about realizing it. This aesthetic, one of extreme reduction and juxtaposition, was one for which he had sympathy, which allowed me to take chances in my composition that I may not have taken if I were working with someone who was less understanding. What he taught me that has had the most lasting impact upon my compositional life was the ability to look at my own scores and determine if I was being true to the ideas embodied within them. Once I became aware of this level of self-criticism, I was able to propel myself to more advanced and meaningful levels of musical thought. The involvement that he took in our lessons is evident from a comment he once made to me after we had been working together for a half-year or so. He said that he had had a breakthrough in his own music because of our lessons together. This openness is a rare quality in a teacher and one that makes the student-teacher relationship a more substantial one.

The quality that stands out for me in his music is its union of inventiveness and rigor. His music plays with rhythm and a pseudo-modality that is magical in its ability to confound the ear as to its construction but satisfy the listener in its sense of direction and purpose. He is an important voice of his generation that has found a way to meld modernist construction with the perceptual experiments of the minimalists and the immediacy of tonal composers.

My relationship with Professor Liderman has been one of the best and most indispensable aspects of my Berkeley education. He is a mentor that has helped me realize what it is to be a composer. His influence in my composing is very real, and I am happy to admit that it is there.

Seven years later these words ring truer than ever. In my own teaching, I strive to do for my students what Jorge did for me. If they can learn to be their own teachers, then their formal education has come to fruition. I oftentimes play his trio Draft for my students, to show how far you can take one idea, and the cognitive effect of immediately juxtaposing contrasting material.

Losing Jorge is a tragedy that I have yet to comprehend. Like so many others, I will miss his friendship, his warmth, and his music.

My heart goes out to his wonderful wife, Mimi.

Ketty Nez

I studied with Jorge while finishing my doctorate at UCB. He had just started teaching there, and was wonderful to work with, as we quickly become friends with whom I could share more than just the details of a composition lesson. With all his students he was more a colleague sharing ideas, not “faculty”—a dynamic I consciously seek in my own teaching.

He stood between several cultures. Having myself come from a varied background living in different countries, I felt we shared that in common. He always encouraged me to explore and experiment, and was solely influential in turning my interest to European new music by his references to developments there in his own teaching (eventually I ended up living there for several years).

On one of his marathon biking tours, he visited Colorado one summer when I was studying at Aspen. He was totally into the mode—the tour would set up camp at 5 p.m., get up at 5 a.m., and bike through the high Rockies for hours; the tour would set up tents in local parks or fields. How he had built up his athletic stamina and sheer determination from having started biking just for fun was a real eye-opening inspiration to me.

I still have the toaster he gave to me as a wedding present; he was a great cook, and quite the epicure! He helped me gain some much-needed perspective after I returned to the Bay Area after living in Europe, myself newly single. His gentleness and subtle humor I will miss most of all.

Joshua Parmenter

Professor Liderman was a wonderful teacher, mentor, and composer. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I was very fortunate to both take courses with him, as well as work with him over a summer with an undergraduate research fellowship (which, lucky for me, also provided many opportunities for Jorge to critique my work). While I consider many of the things that I learned from Jorge as essential to who I am as a composer, I consider myself lucky to have also learned so much about how to teach from him. Jorge was rigorous. While playing through counterpoint exercises, for instance, he made sure you heard and understood where there were problems. But what struck me most were the moments he would take when something may have been a mistake for an exercise, but held the promise of something interesting to modern ears. I realize now that these comments held in them the history of music and its constantly changing aesthetics, and that the way to learn this was to trust in my teacher, who learned them from his teacher, who learned them from his teacher, etc.

In Jorge, there were hundreds of years of knowledge that he passed down to his students. Now I am trying to pass that knowledge on to another generation. I am sad that I won’t be able to talk to him again about recent work or accomplishments (in the way that a student always looks for approval from a mentor). But I take comfort in the fact that as a teacher and composer, I am continuing the lineage that he passed on to me.

Butch Rovan

As I sit down this morning to prepare for my weekly analysis seminar, I’m thinking of Jorge, as I often do. Even if I am not showing his music in class, or mentioning his ideas, he is still there, in the very way I think about music.

I remember once, during a lesson with Jorge, I asked him how he started a new piece. He paused for a moment, then opened his desk drawer and pulled out a worn piece of paper. It was a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, but still showed an intricate and elegant pattern of lines, a graphic representation of Euler’s solution to the famous “Bridges of Königsberg” mathematical problem. “They all start from here,” he said.

Jorge had an amazing way of perceiving and conceiving music. Countless students, like myself, were inspired by his desire to have something perfect and beautiful at the core of every composition. But at the same time, part of Jorge’s genius lay in his ability to mask this, to create elaborate systems of perturbation around a perfect structure.

I hear music differently, compose music differently, and believe in music differently because of Jorge. I also teach music differently, and for that I am more grateful than I can say.

Ronald Bruce Smith

Jorge Liderman

I met Jorge in 1989. We both arrived at Berkeley that year: he as a new assistant professor and me as a graduate student. During my time there as a student, I didn’t study with him and I didn’t begin to get to know him until some time in my second year. At that time, he was working on an opera that had been commissioned by the Munich Biennial.

Some of our first conversations were around the technical procedures associated with a type of modernism that was becoming more in vogue with some younger composers at that time. He had always held a fascination with the technical side of composing and many of our conversations for the next 17 years would involve something of that nature. I remember some time around 1997 when the style of his music took a decisive turn. Unlike the opaque surfaces of some of his work from the early ’90s, the music became bright and buoyant with driving rhythms and a clear melodic focus. It was in this music that Jorge found his expression. He had found a way to compose a music that satisfied him both intellectually and emotionally.

Jorge was a friendly, welcoming, and gentle person. It was rare to see him get angry, and when he did he would often dispel it by ending with a chuckle. I can’t imagine what could drive such a person to end their own life and in such a violent manner. I last saw Jorge in November. He attended a presentation at CNMAT at UC Berkeley that David Tanenbaum and I gave on a project we had been working on. Afterwards, we went out for lunch and David and I later dropped him off near the Berkeley music department. I watched him walk the path from the street toward the music department. It’s a walk we had taken together countless times in the past after getting coffee at Caffé Strada before heading back to the department to attend a talk or a concert. That image is now burned in my memory. I still can’t believe he is gone.

David Tanenbaum

Jorge Liderman, whose suicide has shocked the music world here, was a kind, gentle man with a ready smile. He was also a composer of vigorous, rhythmically vital music—the kind of composer that guitarists cherish.

Jorge first called me about ten years ago to talk about his writing for guitar. We knew each other by then from various events in the Bay Area but did not yet call ourselves friends. Jorge said that he had wanted to write a guitar piece for years, that he played some but had been blocked trying to write for the instrument. “Perhaps I’m too close to the guitar,” he said. He had heard me play recently, and thought I could be the catalyst.

And so we began. I gave him CDs to listen to and scores to study. I showed him examples of what I thought was great guitar writing. Meanwhile, I began to study his work. I found a style informed by his native Argentina, but mostly by Europeans like Stravinsky, Ligeti, and Henze. He seemed least influenced by his immediate surroundings: the tonality of California composers like Lou Harrison, or the composers in academia. There was a scintillating rhythmic vitality in his music that pervaded everything, there were transparent textures and long lines. He didn’t bother to welcome the audience at the beginning of a piece or wave goodbye at the end: the music seemed to begin in mid-sentence and end there, too, as if we got to wade into an endless running stream at some random point and wade right back out some time later. I admired the unique sound world he created, and I thought the transparency, the rhythms, and the lightness could all work well on the guitar.

The great British guitarist Julian Bream said you always want to get the second guitar piece from every composer. And it was indeed with that first piece that we struggled most. It ended up being a solo called Waking Dances, and the work continued after the premiere, even after the recording, when Jorge cut an already recorded movement that he decided didn’t fit.

Working with him was fascinating. When he listened to his music, he seemed to be hearing it for the first time. He listened with his head tilted and a little bemused smile on his face. Sometimes that look would turn into puzzlement. He was much more lenient with me as a player than he was with himself as a composer. One felt that we were never done with a piece, that it was always subject to change, that the pieces themselves were also part of some running stream.

We met for lunch often, to talk about music, projects, politics, anything. At one point he told me that he was lonely and wanted to meet someone, and soon enough Mimi entered his life and brought him happiness. Jorge and I would sometimes ride bikes around Berkeley together. One enduring image I have is of Jorge riding down the middle of the street, helmet askew, riding forwards but looking backwards to make some musical point to me, oblivious of all the horns blaring at him.

Once he got that first guitar piece written, he couldn’t stop. He wrote two hours of music for guitar and violin, and three more works for me: Open Strings for guitar ensemble, Swirling Streams for guitar, bass clarinet, and string trio, and Imaginary Tunes for guitar and string quartet, which I premiered with the Cuarteto Latinoamericano at his 50th birthday concert just three months ago.

And now, this incomprehensible news. He went in mid-stream, the day he was scheduled to give a public talk, the day before a world premiere, a month before a CD release. He didn’t say goodbye, but I will. Farewell, my friend. We will all miss you.

Reynold Tharp

The lingering, numb shock that Jorge is gone makes the recollection of him and what he offered as a teacher wrenchingly difficult. The involuntary flood of memories—joking with Jorge that I’d loan him the eagerly awaited new CD of the Ligeti Horn Concerto if he signed off on my dissertation in the few hours before the filing deadline, or seeing him so often at Yogurt Park—can’t be stemmed. But so many facets of his teaching are worth recalling now because they can help us carry on doing what he did so well. In talking to students, he always paid particular attention to craftsmanship and technique and showed by example how to listen critically to one’s own music. Jorge was remarkably frank and sincere in his evaluations and comments. Sometimes these could be quite critical, but on the other hand, they made one realize that his compliments really were meaningful. And while he was a very reserved person, he was also so generous of time and spirit.

When he was a featured composer at the Berkeley Edge Festival in 2005, he programmed half of his concert with works by recent students, and the diversity of those pieces was further testimony to just how much he could share as a teacher. In the article that broke the devastating news to many of us, Joshua Kosman noted how devoted Jorge was to teaching, “despite feeling not entirely at home in academia.” This is a particularly fitting and salutary way in which I’d like to remember him, because for Jorge it was always music and people that were important, not ideology, politics, power, or bureaucracy. I hope in time we’ll remember him less for the sad, painful circumstances of how he left us and more for the legacy of what he left us: his music, his teaching, our memories of him. It’s a legacy to be performed, listened to, shared, and continued, transmuted in our own work.

Dmitri Tymoczko

Jorge and I had a somewhat uneasy relationship—we disagreed about many things and often butted heads during the year that I studied with him. But I benefited a great deal from this interaction, in ways that were not apparent to me at the time. Four years later, when I was about to leave Berkeley, I showed him a piano piece I’d written. He was pleasantly surprised to see that it had been influenced by his music. “This has a lot to do with my stuff, doesn’t it?” he asked me. “I suppose it does,” I said. I like to think that the unfamiliar look he gave me was something like pride.

One image keeps coming back to me: when I went to Jorge’s house, I noticed that he had posted little signs everywhere—over the toilet, on the refrigerator, on his computer monitor. They all said “Abandon Hope.” At the time I thought they were a somewhat eccentric, but basically harmless exhortation to self-discipline. Now I’m wondering whether they were evidence of something more serious, a deeper pain he concealed from his students. I wish I’d had the courage to ask.

Jen Wang

In the weeks following composer and professor John Thow’s death, the composition faculty at UC Berkeley took it in turns to cover his seminar for first years, of which I was a member. Jorge asked that we bring in work samples, and at the end of each piece, he asked us how we thought about rhythm. What followed was a challenging, wide-ranging discussion, gently mediated by Jorge about the notion of silence and its different possible uses/meanings, about the idea of pulse as a rhythm and a texture, about the idea of sculpting a listener’s experience in time, and on and on. At the end of class, he shared a few of his own recent works, and I asked him how he thought about rhythm. With a smile that was partly self-deprecating and partly mischievous, he said, “In twos and threes.”

I loved studying with Jorge because of his sly wit and his keen insight, all the more striking because of his quiet, gentle personality. He was a generous teacher, preferring to mediate rather than to lecture, preferring to listen rather than to dictate, absorbing your thoughts and mulling over them before emerging with a comment that was piercing and concise. He had a real interest in his students as composers and as people, taking the time to learn about us outside of academia (often during a mid-class break at the coffee shop across the street). He had a way of making you feel like you were a colleague more than a student, of so clearly respecting your voice that he passed that respect on to you. I’ll miss him very, very much.

Michael F. Zbyszynski

I think many composers have an imaginary committee of people that they use to audition their music while working. Certainly, I do. I still imagine showing a piece in progress to Jorge, noticing what parts he would take issue with. While I don’t always listen to him, I do always take time to try to hear my music through his ears, which invariable led to some improvement, some intensification or further burnishing that I would have overlooked had I not studied with him.

Lessons with Jorge were usually all business, dealing with the notes on the page. He was not prone to long tangents about the meaning of music or life, rather he spoke succinctly to the specifics of the work at hand. I was lucky that he and I were writing music using similar methods; he was very interested in musical process, but also in expressivity and dissonance. Lessons would focus on exactly how I was generating material, how I was planning my piece, what worked and what did not, and what possibilities I had to continue my thoughts. Studying with him hugely expanded my library of techniques, unburdening me from problems of my own musical language and enabling me to write music that said what I meant.

After working with him for a year, I left to study in Poland for the next year. I realized at that point how much I had been relying on him to put his finger on the exact place where my compositions needed attention. To fill that need, I started trying to picture a lesson, and trying to intuit what he would have said to me if he had been there. I wrote quite a bit of music that year, and I was eager to show him when I returned. At our first lesson, I went into his office and handed him a string orchestra piece, which he proceeded to examine. This was the typical beginning for our lessons, minutes of uncomfortable silence while he would scrutinize my work. He would page through a score slowly, often turning back suddenly to remember a detail. In this case, he made it to the end of the score and looked up. “What happened?” he asked. “You got good while you were away.” That was probably the most direct compliment he ever gave me, and it really sticks with me.

I realize that in addition to techniques, he taught me both the courage and the discipline I needed to write my own music. I am grateful to have worked with him, and will always carry his memory with me; he has become my musical conscience.</p

H. Wiley Hitchcock (1923-2007) Photo by John Bentham

Hitchcock, H(ugh) Wiley (b Detroit, MI, 28 Sept 1923; d New York, 5 Dec 2007). Just typing that heading, as it will appear in future editions of The New Grove – with its boldfaces, italics, and parentheses – puts a reality to the news that I have been struggling to accept for the past month. Since it was in his lexicographical role as co-editor, with Stanley Sadie, of the four-volume New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986) that I knew Wiley best, let me offer a few entries in tribute.

Cultivated. Wiley used the term in his classic textbook Music in the United States (see WIT) to describe the so-called classical tradition of American music, contrasting it with “VERNACULAR” and awarding both traditions pride of place in his thinking and his writings. As general editor of the Prentice Hall series of college textbooks, Wiley had initially anticipated writing the volume on Baroque music, subject of his early scholarly research (as a scholar on Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Giulio Caccini he was as highly respected in the scholarly circles of the French and Italian baroque as he was among Americanists). But lacking an author for the American music volume he had determined to include in the series, he took the project on himself. (My copy is inscribed, in typically mock horror, “What, purchased only in 1981?”) The volume went through four editions, the last one, published in 2000, with the typically modest gesture of ceding the concluding section on post-1980 music to co-author Kyle Gann.

The term also fits the man. Born in Detroit, educated at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan, where his teaching career began, Wiley came to New York in 1961 to assume a teaching position at Hunter College. With his wife, the eminent art historian Janet Cox-Rearick, the couple created a highly productive and enviable intercontinental academic lifestyle, summering annually in Italy (with side trips to Paris or the Italian Riviera), where they did their most productive research and writing. They were the consummate New Yorkers, dashing and debonair, at home at the Yale and Century Clubs, Carnegie Hall, or the Met (Museum and Opera). The loss of his “212” phone number, inadvertently reassigned during a summer disconnection, was the cause of a rare display of despair.

Everbest. Anyone who ever received a letter (often handwritten in elegant script) or email from Wiley will recognize his favored signoff, borrowed (with attribution) from Virgil Thomson. It could also be the ideal epitaph for this brilliant, elegant, cheerful, plainspoken man, combining as it does the superlative and the constancy of personality. He invoked Thomson’s words frequently; after Wiley’s cancer was diagnosed he quoted Thomson in a note to me: “I shall worry constantly, worry being my acceptable form of prayer.”

ISAM Matters. At Brooklyn College, where Wiley went to teach in 1971, he founded the Institute for Studies in American Music, single-handedly—changing the face of American music scholarship. He organized conferences, including (with Vivian Perlis) the Charles Ives Centennial Festival Conference in 1974, oversaw the publication of a series of monographs that now numbers 35, and until his retirement in 1993 edited the lively and informative biannual blue-ink newsletter. He was succeeded by one of his star students, Carol J. Oja, now teaching at Harvard, then by Ellie M. Hisama and Jeffrey Taylor. In a most worthy accolade, the center is to be renamed the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music.

Ives Thrives. Wiley also founded the Charles Ives Society, serving for many years as president and treasurer, and later as chairman. He established the editorial standards and oversaw many of the scholarly Ives editions produced as part of the Society’s mission. His monograph on Ives for the Oxford Composers series (1977), organized by genre, was the first general survey in what is now a robust field of scholarship. How marvelously Wiley captures the essence of Ives’s music: “Stylistic pluralism was characteristic of his music almost from the beginning. Simple and complex, traditional and radical, conventional and experimental, homespun and rarefied, spiritual and slapstick—these and many other dichotomies jostle each other in neighborly fashion throughout his life as a composer. So too do modes of musical expression derived from widely varied sources…his music has roots not only in that of the masters (and lesser composers) of European and American art music and in the friendly vernacular traditions of his native New England (hymn tunes, country fiddling, camp-meeting songs, brass-band marches, piano rags, patriotic and popular ditties, songs of hearth and home) but also in ‘unmusical’ sounds—horses’ hooves on cobblestones, out-of-tune volunteer church choirs the crack of bat and ball, the special quality of ‘a horn over a lake,’ the clash of two bands opposite sides of a town square each playing its own march in its own tempo—and in untried sounds as well: harmonies in massed seconds or other novel stacks of intervals, microtones, tone-rows, rhythmic and metric serialism, unique instrumental combinations.” Wiley embraced it all. Years later, in 2004, his critical edition of Ives’s 129 Songs was published as part of the Music of the United States of America (MUSA) series. It stands as a model of impeccably, and practically, edited scholarly work.

Leader. In addition to those cited above, Wiley’s other leadership roles included the presidencies of the Music Library Association and the American Musicological Society, as well as the editorships of A-R Editions’ Recent Researches in American Music and Da Capo Press’s Earlier American Music series. He also served on the editorial boards of New World Records, Musical Quarterly, American Music, the Committee on the Publication of American Music (which set the guidelines for the MUSA series of critical editions established by the AMS), and was the first program annotator for the American Composers Orchestra. In 1995 Wiley was named Chevalier de l’Order des Arts et des Lettres.

Musician. Wiley’s own description in the introduction to his Music in the United States of his “humming, singing, whistling, and playing through three and a half centuries of American music,” sums up perfectly the practical and tactile approach to scholarship that made his writings and editions so authoritative and so valuable. He learned those lessons well when he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in the late 1940s. In a NewMusicBox interview, he told Frank J. Oteri:

That’s where I’m at, the music for itself, less than say the sociology of music or biographies of composers, or things like that.

I think my goal as a music historian has been to attempt to reflect the music as it was experienced in its own time, primarily. Also to attempt to reflect what the composer thinks he or she is doing in such-and-such a work and to become, in a sense, a critic myself.

A practical example: recently, as he edited the critical edition of Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, Wiley considered restoring an “original” orchestration to a certain passage. When I pointed out that in my own experience publishing contemporary music I found that composers frequently changed their minds, he was quick to acknowledge that possibility, as well as Thomson’s own sense of pragmatism, which ultimately held sway in Wiley’s final editorial decisions.

When his close colleagues Richard Crawford, Carol J. Oja, and R. Allen Lott produced a festschrift in Wiley’s honor, this Celebration of American Music (1990) included not only dozens of articles about American music by the field’s leading scholars, but music by a wide range of living composers important to Wiley, including Milton Babbitt, Peter Dickinson, Charles Dodge, Ross Lee Finney, Gordon Mumma, William Schuman, and Thomson.

Symmetry. “HWH” – the elegant balance of the three initials seemed so fitting. Wiley was particularly proud to have been the subject of Virgil Thomson’s last completed composition, the portrait HWH: Two Birds. Was it sheer coincidence that Wiley’s own last research project was in turn on Thomson’s Four Saints?

Vernacular. In Wiley’s words, the vernacular was “a body of music more plebeian, native, not approached self-consciously but simply grown into as one grows into one’s vernacular tongue; music understood and appreciated simply for its utilitarian or entertainment value.” Wiley credited his father, who took him from a young age to hear music of all sorts, with his lifelong interest in the vernacular traditions of American music. He played jazz sax and clarinet as a youth, and for a time composed. Even after giving up composition he retained a lively (and highly appreciated) curiosity about new composition and young composers of all stripes.

Wit: That twinkle in his eye illuminated a quick wit. Among my favorites, when Stanley Sadie was named a CBE on the Queen’s Honor’s List, the telegram sent by Wiley and Janet read: “OK Command British Empire but don’t count on colonies.” Vivian Perlis recalled her own telegram, on receiving the Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society: “Kinkelgrats.” And Wiley’s favored “acronym” for his Prentice Hall textbook: MinUS.

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When, in the spring of 1981, Wiley pulled my resume from the reject pile of applicants for the position of editorial assistant for a one-volume American music spinoff from The New Grove, he forever changed my life. Little did either of us know that this small 18-month project would balloon over the next five years into a four-volume monument to American music. Not only did Wiley oversee the project, commission or write many of the major articles (from Emma Abbott to Tin Pan Alley, with major entries on Art song, Stephen Foster, Histories, Musicology, Notation, Opera, Piano Music, Shaker music, and a group of articles on émigré musicians), but he read every last word at least three times, twice in manuscript and then in galley proofs, whether on the subway to and from Brooklyn College, in Italy, Paris, Los Angeles, or on the beaches of the Caribbean.

The growth of the dictionary was at Wiley’s insistence that the most prominent American musicians were as deserving of lengthy articles as their European counterparts, and that the vernacular traditions of rock, pop, jazz, and ethnic musics deserved equal pride of place to the cultivated in such an endeavor. His impeccably penned editorial markings (the dictionary was edited in the pre-computer, pre-fax era) gave cohesion to the work of some 900 writers. Wiley also argued (vehemently at times) on my behalf for everything from adequate office space and support staff to title-page billing, and helped me maintain my equilibrium over regular Yale Club lunches where we theoretically were not supposed to conduct business. Wiley dubbed me the dictionary’s “linchpin,” a moniker I wore proudly, but he was Amerigrove’s brain, heart, and soul. Countless of Wiley’s students have their own tales of similar support, articles or books read in manuscript, or letters of reference that proved to be turning points in their careers, demonstrations of quiet generosity from this most extraordinary man.

Everbest, Wiley. Your inclusive advocacy for American music of all kinds, and your mentoring and support of generations of younger scholars and musicians, brought out the best in so many of us. We so admired your impeccable scholarship, and loved your generosity of spirit and joie de vivre.

Hear the songs!
I know not what are the words,
But they sing in my soul
Of the things our Fathers loved.

(Charles Ives, “The Things Our Fathers Loved”)

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Susan Feder is Program Officer for the Performing Arts Program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A long-time board member of the American Music Center, she previously held positions as Vice President of G. Schirmer, Inc., Editorial Coordinator of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and Program Editor of the San Francisco Symphony.

Ellsworth Milburn 1938-2007 Photo courtesy Shepherd School of Music, Rice University

On May 8, my father called and told me that Ellsworth Milburn, one of my undergraduate composition teachers, had died. Ellsworth taught composition and theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music for 25 years before retiring in 2000 to compose in northeastern Pennsylvania. (He didn’t like Houston’s suffocating heat and humidity.) Many of the details of his life are found in the obituaries at the Rice University and Houston Chronicle websites. I will share my reflections on what Ellsworth has meant to me as a composer and a composition teacher. Driving out to one of the colleges I teach at in the Milwaukee area to turn in end-of-semester grades, I had the opportunity to think about how much Ellsworth meant to me. Despite only studying two years with him, he left an indelible mark on my identity as a composer and composition teacher.

Ellsworth’s background always intrigued me. It wasn’t the same as other composers. After all, how many composers have played for the great comedy troupe Second City? Humor, like the entire spectrum of emotions, was allowed to co-exist with the technical precision of his work. That is, technique alone did not make a piece of music. This may seem self-evident today, but given the time that Ellsworth came of age, the mere whiff of emotional expression could consign a composer to compositional purgatory. Instead of clinging dogmatically to axiomatic composition, Ellsworth dared to let his humanity shine through his compositions. This is the greatest lesson I learned from him: allow yourself to express any emotion, but do it with technical excellence. This is the lesson I most want to pass on to my students.

Technique was of paramount importance to Ellsworth. Once, while I was writing a short set of piano preludes, he commented on an octave I had written between the two hands. He seized on it and made me defend its presence. He, of course had nothing against octaves personally (as he would have joked), but it diminished the independence of the parts. After I gave my defense of the offending interval, he granted me that yes, in this particular instance the offense was not so great and may even be useful. Instead of thinking that I had won this battle, I thought: this guy’s got incredible eyes and ears and is watching you like an eagle, so make damn sure the technique is in the pocket. I like to think it has been ever since.

Of course, for Ellsworth, technique was only at the service of the expressive quality of music. He made a pronounced distinction between the music he respected (usually highly technical) and the music he liked (music that combined great technical control with expression). In the case of the former, it seemed that he was trying to find ways to integrate the admired technical elements into his own work. Once absorbed, he would write emotionally charged and moving music with the strength and precision of excellent technical execution.

Another great lesson I learned from him was that music shouldn’t shy away from expressing the full range of human emotions. His works appealed to me unlike so many other contemporary works in that they conveyed humor, passion, tenderness, anger and many more emotions. Not that he wore his heart on his sleeve as a composer. His music to me is more analogous to that of Brahms, one of his favorite composers. The emotional intensity is draped in rare technical and formal elegance.

During my doctoral studies I lost touch with Ellsworth. A couple of years ago he and I both had pieces on a conference in North Carolina. I looked forward to reconnecting with him and hearing his music again. At the time, he was recovering from a bout with lung cancer and was in weak condition. He missed most of the concerts but ginned up the energy to come hear my piece. After the concert he congratulated me, beaming like a proud father. He gave me the greatest compliment when he said that I had developed my own voice and was writing gripping music. Hearing high praise from one of my most important teachers was the greatest compliment I could have received and I will treasure this memory. We exchanged a few emails in recent years and I sent him a disc of some of my work. He was complimentary and encouraging, urging me on in my career. He gave me courage to continue on despite setbacks and disappointments, something that I, as a teacher, need to remember to give my students.

Music is the rare art that fully engages every element of our humanity, from intellect to spirit, from soul to body. Few composers write music that touch all of these but Ellsworth Milburn was one of them. I will truly miss him and his compositional voice dearly.

***

Composer Keith Carpenter is a lecturer in composition and music theory at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He studied composition with Ellsworth Milburn at Rice University in the late 1980s.

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) Photo © by Derry Moore, courtesy G. Schirmer

[Ed Note: Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) was not only a towering figure among his contemporaries for his own music—a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of operas which continue to be frequently revived. He was also a champion of and role model for many other composers, both of his own generation and of subsequent generations, through his establishing of the Spoleto Festival. We asked John Kennedy, Jack Beeson, Tania León, and Lee Hoiby—all composers who were profoundly touched by their encounters with Menotti—to share their remembrances. – FJO]

John Kennedy

For 49 years at the Festival dei due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, the Festival closed with the Concerto in Piazza, at the Piazza del Duomo. Shortly before the concert would begin, Gian Carlo Menotti would appear in a window of his Palazzo overlooking the piazza, and would wave to the crowd. That a living composer would be cheered to shouts of “Maestro,” and accorded a wide honorific respect, is a sight that I am not sure we will ever again see.

I have had the good fortune of an ongoing and deep relationship with the Spoleto Festivals since 1983 (after their split in 1994, I have worked at Spoleto Festival USA only). One of my favorite memories of Gian Carlo was in 1990, when we started the contemporary music series in Charleston. When he saw me for the first time that year, he playfully hit me in the chest and said, “Gianni, what are you doing programming John Cage at my festival!?!” But he acknowledged a respect for Cage, a composer of his generation, in spite of the aesthetic gulf between them.

Menotti’s relationship to artistic and social change was complex, an unresolved chord (and he did like to resolve them) that accompanied his life and factored in the history of the festivals. But it was also his doing that the festivals were created as multi-arts experimental environments, where an ongoing theme was the rejuvenation of art in fresh embodiment by young artists. He knew the power of immersion in artistic experience, for artists and audiences alike, and thousands of people have had the intoxicating thrill of being transformed by the Spoleto experience. Gian Carlo, for that, artists today and in the future will toast you and thank you.

Two cities have been forever changed and made more alive and cosmopolitan. Countless artists have crossed Spoleto’s stages or had their work performed there. And it was a composer who started it all. It may not have always been easy for the Maestro to embrace that he created something much bigger than himself and his own vision. But what a profound legacy for an individual artist to leave behind: ongoing artistic celebrations where the spirit of the arts lives in full and fresh bloom.

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Jack Beeson

Some people found fault with Gian Carlo Menotti’s libretti and other people found fault with his music; both seemed to be too conventional and Puccini-esque. One time I was playing the piano and conducting a rehearsal of La bohème at Columbia University. Teresa Stich-Randall was singing. When we finished, I went out into the office and found Gian Carlo sitting by himself weeping. I asked him what was the matter and he said that he opened the door and listened to us. What a wonderful voice Stich-Randall had and how he wished he could write music as affecting as Puccini’s.

But Menotti was able to make up the drama, the words, and the music in a combination which was in every sense uniquely his and uniquely successful. And his emergence as a successful and well-known composer, as well as his debut as a stage director, occurred on the campus of Columbia University in 1946 as part of Columbia’s Opera Workshop, a course first offered in the 1943-44 academic year which mounted full productions twice a season.

The Opera Workshop’s productions were equally divided between neglected 18th-century comic operas and new works by American composers, commissioned by the Ditson Fund. The new works were given prominent place in the annual spring festivals of American music co-presented by Columbia’s music department and the Ditson Fund for six successive years to distinguished invited audiences. Several of the premieres were conducted by Otto Luening, who was appointed to the Barnard and Columbia teaching staff and named musical director of the Columbia Theatre Association in the autumn of 1944. Soon after, I was asked to join the workshop as a coach and assistant conductor.

In May 1946, the Opera Workshop staged the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, and it was given a total of five performances. As usual, Menotti served as his own librettist and for this production he was also the stage director. In addition to all his other talents, Menotti had a genius for casting. He had in his mind’s eye and ear the perfect embodiments of the characters he had created. All we had to do was to find them, and he, Otto Luening, and I heard everybody available.

The Metropolitan Opera suggested that we hear Clara-Mae Turner, who had auditioned for them recently. She was tall and of commanding presence. We cast her; and when the Met saw one or more of her performances of Baba, the Medium, they hired her immediately. Otto and I were eager to have Gian Carlo hear and see a fine lyric soprano from the Workshop, but he found her too normal and healthy looking for the part of Monica. He agreed to let her cover the role and perhaps sing one performance. He was enthusiastic about another, with an attractive but oddly timbred voice. After a second audition we cast her, though Otto confided to me that we were lucky to have a cover for the role. Not long after the performance, nodes were surgically removed from her vocal cords. All the rest of the parts were cast to Menotti’s great satisfaction.

I was drafted to play the piano in the small orchestra or, rather, the piano prino, for Gian Carlo’s score requires piano four hands, and Jacob Avshalomov was to cope with piano secondo. The pit accommodated only a chamber orchestra and the commissioned composers had to orchestrate accordingly. Menotti chose an instrumentation that became, with variation, the model for chamber operas: 5 solo strings, 4 woodwinds (with alternations: flute and piccolo, oboe and English horn, etc.), horn and trumpet, 1 percussionist, and a piano or harp. Benjamin Britten was to follow this model in his chamber operas of the late forties.

I asked Gian Carlo why he was requiring two pianists—a question probably posed by producers and conductors of The Medium ever since. “Well, Jack, I’m Italian and I’m superstitious. The instrumentalists I need add up to thirteen, which would mean bad luck, so I added another pianist.”

Because the composer was also directing the staging rehearsals at which I was accompanying and occasionally conducting in the absence of Otto Luening, Menotti had a chance to observe me and asked if I’d like to conduct one of the performances. He’d already asked Otto, who thought it was a good idea and was agreeable to practicing and and playing the piano primo in my stead. I was flabbergasted and said I’d think it over. Actually, I dreamt it over for several nights: I was in an orchestral pit with the score of The Medium. Ready to give the downbeat, I could not raise my arms. So I thanked Gian Carlo and Otto for their well-intentioned offer and was content to go on playing piano primo.

The Columbia performances were so successful that plans were made for a Broadway production. Gian Carlo quickly tossed off a “curtain raiser,” The Telephone, to fill out the evening. I was invited to the opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. After The Telephone, two women—to my left and my right—asked me the same questions. “What kind of a show is this?” Do you know if they’re going to go on singing all evening?” An operatic double-bill was something entirely new for Broadway theatergoers, but the “show” was well received and ran for six months. One music critic wrote that it had been improved by revisions and cutting. In fact, the meter of one measure had been changed and a prayer scene add for Baba.

Many years after that, my own opera The Sweet Bye and Bye premiered at Juilliard. As I was walking out, there was Gian Carlo. And he came up to me, shook hands, and said, “Oh, my competitor.” I was terribly flattered.

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Tania León

As a composer, Gian Carlo Menotti wrote what he wanted to write. His music was his from the very beginning and he understood the roots of his own culture very well. He never relinquished his voice or whomever he was, regardless of the tendencies of the compositional aesthetics that were around, and I think that is a very courageous way of being an artist: When you define who you are, or at least who you want to be, from the very beginning, you don’t sway who you are because of the pressures that you might feel around you.

But the mission of this composer was not only being a composer or writing beautiful music or making an impact with music on the world. Gian Carlo Menotti was also able to assess the fact that there were other human beings around him who were members of that very dream that he was living at the time. His creation of the Spoleto Festival was totally incredible, and it encouraged a lot of young people. He helped a lot of us to emerge and under his guidance, whether he was present or not, to try to emulate the spot that he already had in history.

In the 1970s, going to Spoleto was my first trip with the Dance Theater of Harlem to Europe, and it changed my life completely. I had only been in the United States about five years and I just wanted to be a pianist. But I conducted all the performances of the Ballet Company. They knew I knew those scores very well, and I knew the movements very well, and they trusted me with the fact that I was able to do it, even though at that time I didn’t have the technical skills that you obtain once you are drilled by a teacher or when you study the subject. And then, given no notice, I jumped into the seat and conducted the Juilliard Orchestra. When I came back, I enrolled in a conducting course. But my experiences at Spoleto turned me into a conductor, and that is because of Menotti.

There was hype that we were going to be dealing with Menotti—the Menotti of The Medium and Amahl—but he was very generous. He became a father figure to all of us, guiding us into whatever we had to do. At a young age to have somebody that believes in you and thinks that you are able to do what you’re not aware of, that is something I owe to him.

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Lee Hoiby

Gian Carlo Menotti changed the course of my life, and I can never cease being grateful to him. I was all set for a career as a concert pianist when a friend showed Menotti a few of my on-the-side compositions, which were hardly more than transcribed improvisations. Gian Carlo offered me the full scholarship to study composition with him at the Curtis Institute. It was 1950; I had no idea who he was, but somehow, the next thing I knew I was in Philadelphia. For four years he led me patiently and devotedly through the mechanics of composing: counterpoint, orchestration, form. Each lesson, one-on-one, was a journey into the heart of music. And he gave me the courage to follow my instincts, not the current fashions. He and Mary Curtis Zimbalist got me the Fulbright to study in Rome, but Goffredo Petrassi and Ildebrando Pizzetti conveyed their regrets to Gian Carlo (through Sam Barber) that our compositional style was unacceptable for the students at Santa Cecilia at that time. Petrassi and Pizzetti, themselves once established tonalists, had to survive in economically struggling post-war Italy, where anti-modernism was associated with the fascist period. They must have envied Gian Carlo, a lucky lyrical bird who had managed to fly the coop. I had no problem with the rejection: I had my fellowship stipend and an awesome apartment in Rome; I was suddenly a rich young American in Europe, somehow dumped into Menotti’s and Mrs. Zimbalist’s aristocratic circle of friends, but I could always get away on my Vespa. I was in heaven and almost forgot to compose. I heard Callas, did Salzburg, Paris etc., etc. This was another remarkable gift which Menotti brought into my life, even if I was soon tugged back as by a spring to my beloved desk of solitude. As I assisted Menotii during the productions of The Most Important Man, The Saint of Bleecker Street, and The Consul, then watched him produce my Scarf at the first Spoleto Festival, and then against so many odds produce so many more great seasons of Spoleto Festivals on two continents, I recognized him as a remarkable force in our world of music.

Time and again I have heard of Americans who were first won over to serious music by one of Menotti’s masterpieces. And beyond his effect on certain individual listeners, I suggest that during the post-war years, when atonal despair reigned and the death of tonality was widely proclaimed, when it seemed that any discernible flickers of lyricism in the concert hall or academia were stomped and doused by bureaucrats and critics, the faint flame of tonality (and the vast spiritual realm it enkindles) was tended and fed as importantly by Gian Carlo Menotti as by anyone I can think of.

I offer one anecdote. At a rehearsal of the first Amahl production, Toscanini leaped up, grabbed Times critic Olin Downes by the lapels, and cried, “See, see! It is still possible to bring tears!”

From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Maestro.