Category: Memorials

Remembering Dan Pinkham



Daniel Pinkham
Photo courtesy New England Conservatory

[Ed. Note: Just as the holidays were getting underway, composer Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006) passed away on December 18. We asked his one-time (not composition) student David Rakowski, who was en route to Europe at the time, to offer a few words in his memory. – FJO]

Daniel Pinkham’s death last month at the age of 83 was very sudden and shocking to me. I did not know him well—in fact, every time I saw him I was a little surprised that he remembered who I was—but Dan was frequently brought up in conversations with any number of Boston musicians, and usually as the source of a new, amazing joke or story. More often than not, conversations would begin, “Wanna hear the latest Danny Pinkham joke”? (Example: “What comes between fear and sex?…Funf!”)

When I was applying to colleges to study composition, my high school band teacher, Verne Colburn, a New England Conservatory alumnus, said that NEC would be the best place for me, especially since Daniel Pinkham was on the faculty there. The name Pinkham was familiar from a number of choral pieces that were in the school library (with his name in those big capitals you get on CF Peters scores), and indeed those were very good pieces. At the time, I remember reading a publication that called Pinkham “America’s most performed composer.”

I did get into NEC, and I did go, but it was not possible to study composition with Dan Pinkham there—he taught music history and early music, but not composition. I therefore encountered him first as my teacher for a history of medieval and renaissance music class that I took in 1977. I remember that he had an authoratative manner with the material, that his lectures were extremely enthusiastic, and especially that when he got to the point of a substantial story, he would sit up straighter, cock his head a little, and smile broadly.


Listen to an excerpt of Daniel Pinkham’s one-act opera The Cask of Amontillado now available from Arsis.


Three things stand out from that class I had with him. First, the absolute delight he had in pronouncing the Squarcialupi Codex. So much so that he repeated it several times and had the class repeat it. Second, a sleuthing story that brilliantly demonstrated the importance of historical musicology: It was about a four-part motet that someone had discovered actually had five parts. The fifth part was nowhere to be found. Then research uncovered for what church and event it had been written, and digging through that church’s archives revealed a part book containing the missing part to that (plus presumably another) motet. The third hooked in to Dan’s parallel career as a performer. To demonstrate the difficulty of coming up with a suitable tuning system, the syntonic comma, and the “wolf” fifth, he spent the greater part of one class simply tuning the harpsichord. I remember the strange seriousness of his expression as he listened to each note, how he made the class confirm that each successive note was in tune, and the triumphant grin he had when he played a circle of fifths progression and landed on the “wolf” fifth—especially when a cellist in the class grimaced.

I was also pleased that Dan had a practice of excusing a few of the best students in the class from the final exam. Because I was one of those students that year, and I was able to use the time to write some bad music.

Since that class, I would frequently encounter Dan in the hallway—he always seemed to be rushing to something, head cocked with a jaunty walk and jingling keys. But he would always pause to say hello to me and offer another joke. Once I screwed in enough courage to ask him why he didn’t teach composition, and he smiled very broadly and said, “I had a choice between getting performances and teaching composition, and I chose the performances.”

During one trip back to my hometown after this, I attended a high school district music festival on which was performed a big choral piece by Dan (I don’t remember the name). It was eclectic and very changeable, climaxing on a very thick cluster chord. I had not thought it was possible to write such hard stuff for high school choirs, and I asked a friend how he got his note. He shrugged, “They told us to choose a note, and that was my note.” I couldn’t resist telling him I had taken a course with the composer. He said, “Wow, he must be really cool, huh?”

In the last twenty years or so I encountered Dan sporadically, usually when I visited NEC. He always had a new story, he always remembered me, and he even remembered what we talked about the last time we saw each other. I continue to remember him as a spry and lanky professor in his early 50s with that big smile and quick wit. Perhaps that is why his death caught me unawares. His passing is a great loss.

***

David Rakowski is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University.

Remembering New Music Inspiration Arif Mardin (1932-2006)

Joe and Arif Mardin
Joe and Arif Mardin

with contributions from Rob Schwimmer

Record producer and arranger Arif Mardin died of cancer on June 25, 2006. Mainstream media is abuzz, and rightly so, with talk of his successes and influence on the music business, stemming largely from his long associations with Atlantic Records and monster hit-makers such as Aretha Franklin, the Bee Gees, Phil Collins, Chaka Khan, Bette Midler, Judy Collins, Hall & Oates, and more recently the mellow, Grammy-garlanded Norah Jones. But Mardin also had strong connections to contemporary composition.

A lifelong fan of the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, Mardin actively composed chamber and orchestral music throughout his life. He also composed many works for big band, some of which have been performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. He even wrote an opera, I Will Wait, which was given readings in New York in the mid-’90s.

Born in Istanbul in 1932, Mardin emigrated to the United States upon being awarded the first-ever Quincy Jones scholarship to study at the Berklee School of Music in 1956. Aside from the pop stars whose recordings he helped to define, Mardin worked with a wide array of musicians—from jazz greats Coleman Hawkins and Freddie Hubbard to Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar. And Arif was known to spice up tracks with contributions from a few downtown ruffians brought to his attention by his son, Joe Mardin, a prodigious talent himself. These new music denizens include avant songstress Amy Kohn, pianist/thereminist Rob Schwimmer (from the comedy-experimental music duo Polygraph Lounge), and me.

I’m certainly more “new music” than “pop” (what do these terms mean, anyhow?), but Arif played an important role in my career. Joe and he produced a record of mine, a single, on Atlantic Records in 1986. Joe had “discovered” me at Danceteria in ’85, among eight or so other acts opening for Madonna at a benefit concert. We connected not long after Arif’s collaboration with the archly political punk band Scritti Politti, for whom he played midwife to their rebirth as a sleek, arty, electro funk outfit.

Although my record was indeed pretty pop—for me at least—it was maybe the most twisted dance record Atlantic ever released, complete with Fred Frith on guitar, a plethora of experimental bleeps, tape loops, and noises.

I won’t soon forget Arif Mardin mounting the stairs to my cluttered Hoboken digs to see my tape loops (held suspended from toy plastic darts) and processing gear in action. In 1985, when I told Arif I wanted “prepared guitar” on my record, he was all over it and hired Frith on that recommendation alone. Later, Arif thought nothing of bringing me and my 4-track into Atlantic Studios to dupe a multiply-spliced tape loop onto a Chaka Khan remix, or to play the Musical Shoes (my home-made gate-triggering percussion pads) for Yemenite dance-crossover Ofra Haza. I think he was tickled to see my scruffy setup next to the gargantuan consoles and sound baffles of the studios where we worked.

But aside from these more nomimally experimental forays, Arif Mardin was constantly extending the language of music in everything he did, even as he was absorbing all that was around him (or rather, around all of us). Isn’t that as good a definition of “new music” as any?

Early on, Mardin embraced sampling, rap, and the burgeoning field of the extended club mix, culminating in a masterwork of sorts, Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” (1984). Starting from the relatively straightforward arrangement by the song’s composer, Prince, Arif called on rapper Melle Mel (of Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five) to deliver what would become the iconic cut-up, “Chaka-Chaka Chaka-Chaka-Chaka-Khan”. Arif layered in a young Stevie Wonder in the form of a sample, and the contemporary Stevie Wonder on solo harmonica. Arif himself tied it all together, delineating sections with some inspired musique concrète, handling the razor and splicing tape himself. “I Feel For You” is kaleidoscopic: crammed with ear candy yet architecturally sound. In Mardin’s hands, the conventions of collage, remix, and extended groove expand song form, rather than reduce it.

At the time of his death, he was writing charts for his third solo album, a collection of complex, jazz-inflected art songs; it will be completed with Joe Mardin at the helm. Word has it that not only will the album showcase a lesser-heard side of its creator, but some of its more demanding charts have been stretching the talents of more than a few of the “special guests” on hand.

He will be missed.

Remembering George Rochberg

Last week, after having just gotten back from the National Critics Conference in Los Angeles and racing madly against the clock to get the talk with James Tenney up on NewMusicBox, I learned the sad news of the death of George Rochberg.

I had long wanted to have a conversation with Rochberg for NewMusicBox, but it was not to be. The closest I ever got was a brief phone call, the results of which served as a Hymn and Fuguing Tune comment (remember those?) back in March 2000.

Since there have been an abundance of excellent obituaries for Rochberg available on the web this past week, I felt that there was no need to redo here what has already been done. However, one thing I learned from his recent passing perhaps does bear further discussion here.

Rochberg startled the music community over 35 years ago by rejecting the “historical inevitability” of the 12-tone system and re-introducing tonal elements into his music. In retrospect this was not so revolutionary since so many other composers (Barber and Rorem to name just two) never stopped composing tonal music. But perhaps what made Rochberg’s embrace of tonality so upsetting to the custodians of musical progress was that he was such a good composer of 12-tone music. He was one of them. And, just as Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms from within ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rochberg’s embrace of tonality might arguably have been what led to today’s poly-stylistic musical landscape.

It would seem that this is old news by now, right? Not quite. One of the Rochberg obits last week made me curious about seeking out some of his essays about music which have been collected in the volume The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music published by the University of Michigan Press this past January. When I tried to track down that volume on Amazon, I was greeted with the following one-out-of-five-star “review” of the book by someone only identified as “A reader.”

Rochberg, having failed to distinguish himself as a composer, let alone an alternative to modernism, makes an attempt as an Adorno wannabee in this effort. The latest essay is from 1982, and they all are hopelessly dated. Roger Reynolds “Mind Models” from the 70s generates more excitement and shows more relevance to today’s scene than Rochberg’s stuffy, self-referential musings. This book is destined to collect dust at university libraries, only to be read by those who want to read something that confirms their views, as evidenced by William Bolcom’s introduction.

If you must read, ask yourself this question: On what basis should we take Rochberg seriously? Where is an epistemology that we can trust?

Apparently some people out there are still threatened by Rochberg’s aesthetic positions enough to hide behind anonymity and hurl ad-hominem attacks his way that say more about the closed-mindedness of Rochberg’s detractors than they do about Rochberg’s own music or ideas.

The sad news here is that according to Amazon’s statistics, 4 out of 7 readers found this gibberish helpful which means that, more than likely, more than half the people who visited this page did not buy this book because of it. (Admittedly the total number is not one to be proud of, which makes the negativity here all the more destructive.)

At the National Critics Conference there was a lot of talk about how criticism can continue to be relevant in a world where uncritical knee-jerk reactions are the rule of the day, and everyone can blog his or her own singular viewpoint to the world on a now completely level playing field. Perhaps the way to be relevant, as I have argued many times before, is to take on a greater level of advocacy and to present as many sides to an argument as possible rather than simply worrying about being right and making sure everyone who disagrees with you is summarily proven wrong.

That said, here’s my opinion… Rochberg, like Cage (seemingly an unlikely pairing, but an apt one here), showed there was more than one path and the world is a better place for it. Thank you, Mr. Rochberg.

Remembering Leonard Stein (1916-2004)



Leonard Stein with Thomas Schultz

At the time that I was finishing my undergraduate studies and beginning to look around for a place to do graduate work, the name Leonard Stein was offered repeatedly in reply to my almost desperate inquiries about with whom I might study the 20th century piano repertoire. I was completing four stimulating years as the student of John Perry, a distinguished pianist/teacher whose specialties were Beethoven and Schubert, and whose advocacy of works by conservative university-based composers was an important part of his pianistic activities. My curiosity about more adventurous composers was growing, though, and the only reaction from fellow piano students to my wild enthusiasm for the bizarre sounds of Boulez, Cage, Wolff, and Lucier was uncomprehending silence. During those years, I played Schoenberg’s Op. 11 and the piano part of Pierrot Lunaire, Ruggles‘s Evocations, and Stockhausen‘s KlavierstŸck IX, and became good friends with the composition and philosophy students.

Those were the days when Leonard was one of just a few pianists in the United States who played the most radical, avant-garde repertoire, music that we knew only from recordings and hard-to-come-by scores, and he counted many avant-garde composers among his friends and musical comrades. Of course, he also played what was, in those days, still “new music”—Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg—and we listened, in the light of his professional and personal relationship with Schoenberg, with heightened attention and pleasure.

Eventually, I had to make a choice between Yale, which would have been a continuation of my work on the traditional repertoire, and the recently formed California Institute of the Arts, with its reputation for innovation and crazy experimentation (not always just in things musical). So when I arrived in California in 1975 to become Leonard’s student at Cal Arts I jumped immediately, with his friendly, and sometimes amused, guidance, into the cold, refreshing waters of Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, and Stockhausen. Right away, he conscripted me for duty in ensemble pieces by Carter, Ives, Berio, and Earle Brown, and it was just what I’d been looking for.

I left my first lessons with Leonard, however, with a feeling of puzzlement, coming as I did from a world where lessons were filled with detailed criticism of each bar of music, more practicing and comparing of recordings with my own efforts and those of other students, followed by additional lessons on those same measures of music. Sessions with Leonard were more often my playing through of the piece, his correcting of the score’s misprints and my own naïve oversight of crucial musical elements (and wrong notes…) and then a wide-ranging conversation about the composer of the work, whom he, of course, knew. This led into stories about some of the other pianists he’d heard play the piece and about young composers he liked and recommendations of new pieces I should bring in the next week. It took me some time to recognize the new situation I was in.

It was during our weekly sessions at the piano that Leonard told me of the violent frenzy with which Boulez played his own piano music, and the connection between the seemingly sparse and ascetic music of Webern and the world of Schubert and Brahms. When I asked about Cage and Feldman, Leonard introduced me to Earle Brown, who happened to be at Cal Arts that year, telling me to take his course on experimental music and painting. After I’d worried out loud one day about how to continue my involvement in new music when I finished at Cal Arts, Leonard advised me to go to Italy to work with Frederic Rzewski.

Leonard’s seeming disinterest in teaching the traditional piano lesson stemmed not from a paucity of ideas about playing the pieces students brought to him but rather, I think, from his sense of his own life as a musician. The variety of his work was astonishing, and how interesting that he was not really known as “a pianist”, although he’d made many distinguished recordings at the keyboard. If you asked at random a number of people who’d encountered him or known him, what they knew him as, you’d get a kaleidoscope of answers: composer’s assistant, writer, editor, theorist, musicologist, lecturer, conductor, teacher, mentor and, yes, pianist. He was a wonderful example of a true musician, clarifying that music is a life, not a career.

Mentioning certain topics or asking a presumably innocent question of Leonard could bring forth a flow of reminiscences and impressions. He was particularly enthusiastic about Bertolt Brecht‘s poetry, and amused by the writer’s prisoner-like appearance. I had a curiosity about Hanns Eisler, having just played the 2nd Sonata and the Op. 3 pieces (recommended to me, of course, by Leonard), and he enjoyed describing Eisler’s comical presence and good-natured character, which endeared the composer to many during his years in the United States. I’d often wondered about Leonard’s political leanings during the first decade that I knew him, as he expressed quite a few times an antipathy towards “political” music (especially pieces by Rzewski and Christian Wolff), and was unhappy that I would spend my time learning and playing such things. The composer/pianist Yuji Takahashi, who’d been invited by Leonard to play XenakisEonta in Los Angeles (it must have been the 1960s), told me that he felt Leonard had become much more open-minded as he aged. I witnessed this when, after a concert in 2001, where I’d played Rzewski’s hour-long The People United Will Never Be Defeated, his only criticism was an amused, “It’s way too long!”

It was, in fact, Leonard who set an example of broadmindedness for us—in my case, introducing me to Eisler, Hauer, Reger, Busoni, guiding me through Schoenberg, Webern, Sessions, Stockhausen, Boulez, and reminding me, when I grew frustrated, thinking that I’d explored the farthest reaches of 20th century music, that “all music is new music”. He asked me many times, in a lightly mocking tone, why I refused to even consider certain composers or types of music and, ultimately, why I worried so much about everything.

I left Cal Arts and Los Angeles after two years and, following a period of doctoral study at the University of Colorado in Boulder, eventually settled with my wife, the composer Hyo-shin Na, in San Francisco. I took up a position on the piano faculty at Stanford and saw Leonard less frequently, although I kept in touch, until the advent of email, by writing letters and making the occasional phone call. During my first years in San Francisco, I traveled to New York, where I was involved in performances and recordings of pieces by Stravinsky and Schoenberg with Robert Craft. Craft, of course, had been the driving force behind Columbia’s complete Webern recordings made in the 1950s, and Leonard had been the pianist in the chamber works, and solo Variations, and had accompanied Marni Nixon in the songs. Craft still held Leonard in the highest esteem and spoke to me fondly of their work together. In 1989, I found myself feeling like a strange sort of shadow trailing far behind Leonard, when I played the harpsichord solo in a performance Craft conducted of Carter’s Double Concerto at Alice Tully Hall; he’d led the same piece in Los Angeles in 1962 with Leonard as the harpsichordist.

Leonard visited San Francisco a number of times in the 1990s, in association with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, for whom I was, at the time, one of the pianists. During the first of these visits, in 1993, he gave a remarkable performance (by memory, even though he was 77 at the time!) of Schoenberg’s Suite Op.25, along with the violin and piano Phantasy. A few years later, he returned to participate in a public discussion of Stockhausen’s music prior to a performance of Mantra. The appearance of “performers” on such panels in San Francisco is still exceedingly rare, composers being given pride of place almost exclusively. As such, Leonard’s presence was a testament not only to the breadth of his activities, but also to the respect afforded him as a pianist/intellectual (a rare creature). Leonard once told me that he had, in fact, “discussed” this issue of the accepted hierarchy of composer/performer with Schoenberg. When he proposed the equality and, even, superiority of the (in this case) pianist to the composer, in the light of the pianist’s versatility, experience with a wider range of music than the composer, and constant exposure to the real physical problems of making music by playing an instrument, Schoenberg simply wouldn’t hear of it, and the conversation went no further.

Leonard came to Stanford in May 2001 to talk to the students and other members of the community, many of whom were there because they remembered a visit he’d made decades earlier. (Sitting in the audience was Jon Nakamatsu, winner of the 1997 Van Cliburn Piano Competition who, as a teenager growing up in the Bay Area, had flown regularly to Los Angeles for theory lessons with Leonard.) At the conclusion of Leonard’s talk, he and I played the two-piano version of Schoenberg’s Second Chamber Symphony, a piece he’d played countless times with numerous pianists. During two afternoons of rehearsal I enjoyed the wild, impetuous, highly dramatic feel of the music while playing at Leonard’s tempos, following his shifts of speed and dynamics, sometimes barely making it to the next page turn. This was animated, good-natured, high-spirited music making, completely devoid of any concern for perfectly simultaneous attacks and asphyxiating, unyieldingly steady tempi.

After the performance, a local musician who’d been in the audience approached me and asked what it was like to work with Leonard, and about the nature of our musical and intellectual interaction during rehearsals and what he imagined must have been a need to integrate our, at times, disparate visions of the piece. What could I say to such a question? “I just do what he tells me to do!”

Of the many projects undertaken by Leonard in the years I knew him, possibly the one with the most far-reaching repercussions is the annual series of piano recitals called Piano Spheres. Launched in 1994, with four younger Los Angeles pianists who had close associations with him, the series is a counterweight to the myriad piano recitals comprised of endless re-playings of the same narrow repertoire. Its focus is on not-so-frequently heard music, mostly of the 20th century and including a wide range of recently written pieces, some of them commissioned by Piano Spheres. For his own part in the series, Leonard gave recitals that included, among many other works, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, the Boulez 3rd Sonata, the solo works of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, the Eisler 3rd Sonata and Op. 3 pieces, and the fourth movement of Birtwistle‘s Harrison’s Clocks, which was dedicated to him. In addition to this almost overwhelming abundance of music to be heard by Los Angeles audiences, Leonard has left a legacy of continuing challenge to the pianists involved in the series: I can only imagine the resourcefulness and amount of pure hard work it must take to present a new group of programs each year.

Thinking about Leonard, I have the impression of a highly complex personality with a great many intertwined character strands, many quite unusual and rare. Certainly, there was his generosity in sharing ideas, enthusiasms, friendship. Was his lyrical big-toned playing of Bach a manifestation of this generosity? There was his tendency to focus his feelings about a complex of issues into a concise, pithy remark, and I remember how much I enjoyed his occasional short, dryly humorous letters with their compact, elegant handwriting. Standing out most in my mind now, though, is a day in the spring of 2001 when our conversation came round to David Tudor, and Leonard remarked about how much he admired Tudor’s seeming disdain for celebrity and fame, and about how this quality is so rare in the world of musicians.

A week after Leonard’s 2001 Stanford visit, Hyo-shin and I flew to Vienna and our paths crossed there (he’d just played the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony with a young Austrian pianist). The three of us spent a week going to lectures, rehearsals, concerts, museums, and restaurants and, even though he was 40 years older than either of us, it became clear after a few days that we simply couldn’t keep up with him. One eveni
ng, as we sat together over a late dinner following a recital in which I’d played Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, I asked him for his thoughts on my playing of the piece. The performance had gone reasonably well until the very last note of the final, sixth piece which, when I tried to play it at the pppp dynamic indicated by the composer, simply didn’t sound. After letting me contemplate the rather heavy silence created by my request, he smiled—”You might try to play the last note a little louder….”</p

Remembering Red Heller

Red Heller died last week at 105. She was one-of-a kind, not only because she was born in the 19th century, and departed in the 21st century.

At a time when most women did not go to college, Red not only graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, but also moved from her home in Pittsburgh to New York where she obtained her graduate degree in social work at Columbia University. She was an intrepid woman: she not only worked at her profession, but also traveled extensively as a young woman, again, at a time when most women lived relatively confined lives. One of her favorite stories told how she managed to travel to India: having gotten as far as Europe, she met an older woman by chance who was en route to India and needed assistance in traveling. Red signed on immediately, traveled by boat and train to India, delivered the woman to her relatives there, and continued on. Seventy or more years later, well into her 90s, Red remembered all the details of the trip – where and what she saw, and accompanied the story of the trip with a commentary on the social issues affecting women and children in India and elsewhere at that time.

Red was passionate about music, especially the contemporary music of her long life. She and her husband, Ernest Heller – known by all as Pick, lived in an apartment on East 57th Street here in New York where they entertained musicians, composers, conductors, artists, and friends constantly. Pick was erudite, spoke many languages, and had a vast repertoire of jokes, the last of which he told me the day before he died. When he died at 94, Red, then 96, was disconsolate, but lived on with the bravery and intelligence with which she had always led her life. From the 1970s, when I first met Red and Pick, they were omnipresent at almost every concert we attended in New York. Red was usually accompanied by her two sisters, one in a perky small hat, the other wearing a veil across her nose and eyes, and by Pick. Afterward, everyone went to their apartment for food, conversation, and more music on their grand piano. I remember after-concert evenings in the 1970s that were extraordinary, with Pierre Boulez, Jacob Druckman, Robert Mann, Arnold Newman, Ned Rorem, and many others, including my husband, Earle Brown, all in the same room. Red was particularly close to Edgard Var&egravese and his wife Louise, so much so that Var&egravese dedicated one of his works – Ameriques – to her. The score was somewhere in Red’s desk, or closet where she kept her other treasures, many of those being the photographs of musician friends like Jennie Tourel accumulated throughout all the years of passionate involvement with the music world. In the front entrance hall, she had framed small scores dedicated to her by “her boys”, Earle and Boulez among them. And in Pick’s bedroom, also Red’s sitting room, some things changed from time to time, but the constants were a group photograph taken by Earle at a surprise 60th wedding anniversary party that we – the Heller’s young friends – made for them at the home of Ann and Paul Sperry, a photograph of Red’s father, and one of Bill Clinton.

Red and Pick were a constant presence at the two major contemporary music festivals of their time in this country, first at Tanglewood and then in Aspen. One of my favorite Aspen memories was the evening when Nicolas Slonimsky, then about 97 years old, arrived at the Heller’s pre-concert dinner straight from the Aspen airport, having flown in from Los Angeles. The effects of the high altitude struck, the paramedic team arrived, and rather than immediately providing the oxygen Slonimsky needed, the young team started to take his medical history. The first question was “How old are you, sir.” Slonimsky said he was 97; the paramedics looked around the group in disbelief, and asked again. Red, probably in her late 80s at the time, continued to serve dinner, and urge everyone to eat so that they would arrive on time at the concert in the Aspen tent. Slonimsky continued to insist that he was 97, the Hellers also insisted, in between courses, that he was indeed that age, as everyone could see that they were in their 80s and that he was their elder by far. The young, athletic medic team just couldn’t believe any these “stories”, since the Hellers and Slonimsky seemed so “young” and forceful. Finally after much discussion amongst the young people about the impossibility of Slonimsky’s reputed age, Slonimsky announced that he no longer needed the oxygen that he hadn’t yet been given, thanked the medics for coming so promptly, and everyone, including our indomitable elders, trooped off to the tent for the Fromm concert.

Red had an avid interest in the political arena: she was reading The New York Times each day when she was over 100 years old. She continued to pay attention to the major issues of the world, and although almost entirely deaf, could somehow carry on a conversation with me about the things she cared so passionately about. Apart from politics, one of these was the MacDowell Colony. In the winter of 2001-2002, I was asked to join the MacDowell Board, and knowing of Red’s life-long support and involvement of the Colony, I wanted to take her place there. I went to 57th Street to see her immediately, to tell her the news. She asked if I was sure I had been invited, because “the Board was a powerful one”, and Board members had to be truly grown-up – a position that I had not yet quite attained being still so very young in her eyes.

Red’s last request to me, repeated frequently in her final years, was that I travel around the world, and come back to tell her about everything I had seen. Her passionate involvement in the world lasted until almost the very end of her life: she was indeed remarkable. I loved her dearly.

Remembering Ellis Freedman



Ellis Freedman Receiving the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction in 1999

Ellis Freedman, who died on June 16 at the age of 82, was one of those extraordinary people who, although not a musician himself, made a great contribution to American music as an advocate, a visionary and a builder.

Over a legal career spanning nearly half a century, Ellis’s client list included a “Who’s Who” of the great American composers of the Twentieth Century: from Copland, Thomson, Bernstein, Carter and Schuman through Adams, Del Tredici, Druckman, Reich and Tilson Thomas. To all of these composers, as with his many other clients, he was not just a skilled and zealous legal representative, but in the true sense of the word, a “counselor:” someone to whom any problem could be brought, any secret told in complete confidence, and who would always give advice based not just on what would give the client a temporary advantage in the matter at hand, but what would best serve the client in the long run. Ellis always considered the world of American contemporary music to be a small village in which all of his composer clients would be living for their entire careers, and urged them to consider that scenario in making their business decisions. And I would be surprised if any of his composer clients ever regretted bearing that wise advice in mind.

Perhaps Ellis’s most enduring contribution to American music, and certainly one of which he was very proud, was his role in creating and establishing the various foundations set up by his clients, most notably The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. and the Virgil Thomson Foundation Ltd. I do not think it slights the memory of either Copland or Thomson to believe, as I do, that the idea for these foundations evolved through discussions each composer had with Ellis over a period of years. And it is demonstrably true that Ellis took a leading role in developing the boards and programs of those foundations that now dispense more than $1.6 million annually to the field of American contemporary music, and are set to do so far into the future. This is something that honors the memories of Copland, Thomson, and Ellis Freedman.

Ellis was a consummate professional, but his excellent legal skills were matched and enhanced greatly by his common sense, humor, and great sense of fairness and decency that made working with him, as client, colleague or “adversary” a special pleasure. I met Ellis in 1985, when I had just been appointed President of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., and he was represented many of B&H’s most important composers, including Copland, Carter, Del Tredici and Druckman. At the time, I had practiced law for all of three years after four years as a manager at European American Music, and to say that I was relatively inexperienced compared to Ellis would be understating the case rather substantially. Yet he treated me with great courtesy and personal kindness, made a great effort to understand (and explain to his clients) the positions I and my company had to take at the time, and worked out deals that kept all of the composers with us and allowed relationships to build. I later learned that he did this with all of his composer clients at their respective publishers, and I quickly came to understand how important that kind of bridge-building is in creating and keeping the highly personal composer-publisher relationship healthy and strong.

Over the following years, he and I made numerous deals, including those that brought Reich and Adams to B&H, and we developed a strong personal friendship. But it was still one of the most moving moments of my professional life when Ellis called me in early 1996 to say that he was retiring from active practice and to ask whether I would take on the representation of his foundation clients, including Copland, Thomson and Koussevitzky. This was the easiest professional decision I have ever had to make (not to mention the quickest!). In the seven years since that time, my relationship with Ellis became, happily, even closer. Not only did I rely on him for technical and historical information about the foundations, but I came to rely on him even more as a wise counselor and close friend in both professional and personal matters. He remained a very active member of the boards of both the Copland and Thomson foundations until his final illness forced his retirement in early May, and his sage advice was very helpful to both in avoiding the worst effects of the recent difficult economic times.

I always looked forward to my regular catch-up sessions with Ellis, and it is very hard to accept that there will not be another one. I owe Ellis a great debt of gratitude, and so does everyone in the field of American contemporary music. Thanks, friend.

Remembering Lou



John Luther Adams, Bill Colvig, and Lou Harrison
Photo by Dennis Keeley

The great redwood has fallen.
Light streams into the forest.
The sound will reverberate
for generations to come.

The passing of Lou Harrison marks the end of an era in American music that began with Charles Ives and continued on through Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, and John Cage.

The expressive range, diversity of media, prolific quantity, and consistent quality of Lou’s music is perhaps unequalled among recent composers. From heroically dissonant orchestral counterpoint to explosive percussive rhythms to ravishing, timeless music for gamelan, his body of work embraces most of the important currents in the music of our time.

Lou always fearlessly pursued his own way. While still a young man, he left the competitive careerism of New York City to make his home on the California coast. There—surrounded by the beauties of nature and the richness of Pacific cultures—he created his own uniquely personal world, grounded in his credo: “Cherish. Conserve. Consider. Create.”

As a teacher Lou introduced many young Western musicians to the music of other cultures or, as he called it, “the whole, wide, wonderful world of music”. His diminutive Music Primer remains a wellspring of creative wisdom about the life and the craft of a composer.

Through his wide-ranging friendships, Lou was a central figure connecting five generations of musical independents. His spirit lives on in his music and through the immeasurable gifts he gave to so many younger musicians. I feel blessed to have been among them.

Thirty years ago, as an aspiring young composer, I won second place in a composition contest. I was especially thrilled since one of the judges was Lou Harrison, whose music I very much admired. Emboldened, I made the pilgrimage to San Jose State University where Lou was teaching at the time. I was delighted to find the man himself to be every bit as scintillating and engaging as his music.

From that day on, Lou was a generous mentor, an attentive friend and an inspiring role model to me, as he has been for many other younger composers. Lou always treated me with respect as a younger colleague. His matter-of-fact embrace of my aspirations removed any shred of doubt in my mind that I would make a life as a composer.

When I first visited Lou and his partner Bill Colvig at their home in Aptos, they picked me up at the bus station in Santa Cruz. Bill was driving and Lou insisted that I ride in the front seat. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. From then on whenever we drove anywhere together this was the seating arrangement. Lou always treated me like visiting royalty.

In my mid 30s I found myself weighing the risk of quitting my day job to devote myself to composing full-time. My boss offered me the opportunity to continue working on a half-time basis. As I often did, I called Lou for his perspective.

As usual, he spoke directly to the situation: “There are no half-time jobs, John. Only half-time salaries.”

I promptly quit my job and never looked back.

Over the years Lou taught me many lessons about the art of composition and the life of a composer. He also gave me the best conducting lesson I ever had.

In 1988, Lou and Bill came to Alaska for a concert of Lou’s music with the Fairbanks Symphony. On the program was his Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra, which I conducted. As a percussionist I’d always had steady time. And as an occasional conductor I’d always prided myself on my precision and attention to detail.

After the dress rehearsal I asked Lou what he thought.

“You remind me of John Cage,” he said.

Intrigued and vaguely flattered, I asked: “How so?”

“Well, you’re more kinesthetic than John…”

My intrigue and flattery grew.

“…When John used to conduct he wanted to hear every detail of the music and he tried to show every nuance of the score. So, of course, the tempo would gradually slow down.”

Instantly I recognized that I was doing the very same thing. At the next night’s concert my conducting was leaner, crisper and steadier in tempo—a style I’ve tried to maintain ever since.

This lesson from Lou was not just about conducting. It was also a lesson about teaching. Lou was fond of recalling that his teacher Henry Cowell would often begin a sentence by saying “As you know…” and then impart some wonderfully unexpected pearl of wisdom.

In his own teaching Lou employed this technique brilliantly, using the gentle touch of flattery to prepare receptive minds for the gifts of learning.

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

This was Lou’s one and only visit to Alaska. But it was homecoming for Bill. In the late 30’s Bill had left Berkeley to live for several years on the rough and ready frontier of Alaska and the Yukon, and he was thrilled to be back in the North again.

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

In 1991 I composed Five Yup’ik Dances, based on traditional songs of the First People of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta. These pieces are composed entirely of “white notes,” with no sharps or flats. After looking through the score Lou was very enthusiastic, saying: “You’ve rediscovered those seven tones as something wild, fresh, and new.” Encouraged by Lou’s reaction, I went to compose Dream In White On White—a larger work in Pythagorean diatonic tuning which led eventually to the 75-minute expanse of In the White Silence.

Sometime in my mid 40s, I began to feel acutely the professional limitations of my life in Alaska. While colleagues elsewhere had blossoming careers, things seemed to be moving very slowly for me. I thought seriously about moving someplace closer to the centers of musical life. I decided to apply for a fellowship and asked Lou if he would write a letter of recommendation for me. Although he was very busy, he cheerfully agreed.

When I received the letter first thing I noticed was the signature, in Lou’s incomparable calligraphy. (This was before the development of the lovely “Lou” computer font.) But beyond the elegance of his hand, I was struck by the heart of his message. Among other things, Lou observed that by choosing to live in Alaska I had chosen to develop a deep relationship with place and to avoid what he called “the group chattering of the metropolis.” This, he said, had allowed the growth of my work to be “both integrated and in ‘real time.'”

Clearly Lou understood the meaning of my life choices better than I did!

I didn’t receive the fellowship. But that letter from Lou was an enduring gift. I haven’t thought about leaving the North since.

One summer when an orchestral work of mine was performed at the Cabrillo Music Festival, I spent a memorable week with Lou and Bill. After the concert that included my music we had dinner. My piece had been well performed and well received, and I was in an upbeat mood. At the time Lou was enjoying a surge in performances of his orchestral music, and I suggested that this must be gratifying to him.

“It’s nice,” he said. “But it’s not really what we do.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“The orchestra is a glorious noise. But the heart and soul of our musi
c lies elsewhere. We’re the ones who form our own ensembles, make our own tunings, build our own instruments and create our own musical worlds. We’re the ‘Do It Yourself’ school of American music!”

I was humbled. Here Lou was finally starting to receive from the classical musical establishment some measure of the recognition he deserved, yet he wasn’t seduced at all. He always had a singular dedication to the deepest roots of his music and an unwavering sense of who he was.

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

As their flowing beards and hair turned white, Lou and Bill grew to resemble one another more and more. When Bill died in 2000, Lou was at his side, holding his hand. “It was a peaceful death,” said his soul-mate. “He was so beautiful…Like a beautiful animal returning to Nature.”

Like many of their friends, I worried that Lou would soon follow Bill. But he continued his life and work with undiminished energy and enthusiasm well into his 86th year. When he died, he was on his way to a festival of his music.

As Lou once quipped: “All good things come to an end. Even the 20th Century!”

Yet Lou Harrison and his joyful, ecumenical life and music seem more vital and pertinent than ever before.