Tag: composer memorial

Proudly Disruptive Yet Guilelessly Generous—Remembering Elliott Schwartz (1936-2016)

Posted on December 21, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

Elliott Schwartz at the piano surrounded by scores of his music.

Forty years ago, as a grad student composer, I had learned about Elliott Schwartz’s more heretical works from the mid-sixties to early seventies—Elevator Music, for example, with twelve groups of student musicians on twelve floors whose music waxes, blends, and wanes as audience members ride up and down with open elevator doors; or Telly for TVs, radios, pre-recorded tape and a variety of conventional instruments.  At that point I thought of Elliott as one of the more aggressive, proudly disruptive composers of the day (usually assumed to be a good thing among my peers at the time). But it was after reading his refreshingly informal, conversational Listener’s Guide to electronic music that I began to realize that Elliott had a different passion, which was to welcome everyone—whether aficionado or skeptic—into his own personal, life-long exploration of the physical, cultural, and psychological spaces where music reveals and transforms who we are. Ever since then, in my periodic association with him as co-author, presenter, and friend, I’ve come to marvel at, aspire to, and now mourn the loss of Elliott’s unique mix of intellectual brilliance and guileless generosity in wanting to let the whole world in on music’s big secrets.

Those who have watched him speak to a group—of students, colleagues, or especially “lay” listeners—will always remember with delight those signature moments when Elliott (demonstrating from the keyboard with his Mephistophelean goatee and thick glasses) suddenly catches himself in mid-sentence, looks straight out with widening eyes, and proclaims “but instead we find something quite surprising…”

There is much that he hoped would surprise, enlighten, and delight us all: that music can make perfect sense and be completely unexpected in the same instant; that musical perception can be radically altered by what our other senses encounter when we hear it; that performance ritual and the norms and values it projects are as central to the experience of a live performance by the New York Philharmonic as to, say, an Ashanti healing ceremony; that the future of music flows mysteriously but inexorably from a sometimes affectionate, sometimes fractious conversation between its past and present. These are among the ever-unfolding discoveries that animated Elliott’s life and career, and he was convinced that a deep dive into such phenomena could make the music of any tradition, old or new, vitally interesting to anyone.

For Elliott, though, such pursuits were most urgent in his own journey as a composer. And since about 1990, the most consistent feature of his music has been an interweaving of past and present musical languages through collage, quotation, improvisation and moments of theater. These are integrated into a musical discourse—by turns hard-edged or lyrical, brutal or whimsical—in which the historical emerges from, recedes into, and otherwise haunts the new, as if today’s music were in a dreamlike, at times nightmarish internal struggle with its antecedents. There have always been high points in Elliott’s repertoire, but to my ears, his music has become more focused in this direction with time, and ever more clear-eyed and compelling. He did indeed have, as he said shortly before he died, “so much more music to write.”

Until his artistically gifted and beloved wife DeeDee left us unexpectedly about three years ago, Elliott continued to travel the country and the world by invitation, his music being recognized both overseas and at home as iconic and exemplary in the musical library of American modernism. Given the long and distinguished list of composers, performers, and scholars whom he has mentored and with whom he has collaborated, I can only believe that his music will be kept alive and inspire us for decades to come. My hope is that, after the grieving, all of us who remember the persistent (if somewhat mischievous) twinkle in Elliott’s eye and who live our lives in music will carry that big-hearted spirit—and that deep and relentless curiosity—into all our future endeavors.

Elliott Schwartz and Daniel S. Godfrey

Elliott Schwartz and Daniel S. Godfrey

Magical Yet Practical—Remembering Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)

Posted on December 12, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

“Over, under, and with a twist” — this was how Pauline Oliveros described the technique she was demonstrating for coiling an audio or video cable for efficient storage or transport. This was also my personal introduction to Pauline in the fall of 1977, when I arrived at UC San Diego as a graduate composition student. All incoming grad students were required to take a kind of basic training course—taught by Pauline that year—that instructed us in the essential survival skills for a composer in that department. The “Over, under” method for coiling cables (which is also good for staying on good terms with your technical staff – another important but often-overlooked ability) was one of two practical skills covered that first week. The 2nd was tape splicing, a procedure now only practiced the way anthropology students are taught how to make a stone arrowhead by chipping obsidian or chert.

I first became familiar with Pauline’s work I of IV as a teenager in the late 1960s from the LP release on Columbia’s Odyssey label that also included Richard Maxfield’s Night Music and Steve Reich’s Come Out. This disc (along with Terry Riley’s In C) changed my life.  I had also spent most of 1972 through ‘74 hanging out at the Center for Contemporary Music (at Mills College and then under the direction of Robert Ashley), which was the institutionalized evolution of the legendary San Francisco Tape Music Center of which Pauline was a co-founder. The Tape Music Center’s recording archive was available at Mills, and I was able to hear many of those early electronic works by Pauline and many others. In fact, my decision to select UC San Diego for graduate school was made in large part because Pauline was on the faculty there along with composer Robert Erickson, whom I had seen listed as both Pauline’s and Terry Riley’s teacher.

Close on the heels of those first two practical assignments was another of a rather different character: to keep a dream journal for the whole semester. This was a process that required learning techniques of awareness during dreaming that facilitated remembering one’s dreams upon waking and then getting them down on paper. (This was, after all, well before personal computers.)

While Pauline was fully grounded in the practicalities of making music, she was always able to connect directly to a place that can reveal mystery and magic.

While it was not evident to me back in 1977, that mix of the extremely practical (how to coil an audio cable and splice tape) and whatever its opposite might be (the dream journal) in many ways exemplified something essential about Pauline.   While she was fully grounded in the practicalities of making music, living and thriving in the physical world, she was always able to connect directly to that place in our less-than-conscious experience of the world—a place where we experience the moment more deeply than we assume possible and a place that can reveal mystery and magic.

I am somewhat at a loss for the right term here, as the easy words to describe Pauline’s work and impact all evoke the “spiritual” realm.  While that is certainly how many people experienced much of Pauline’s later work, such as the Sonic Meditations or Deep Listening, I don’t think the term “spiritual” gets at the truth of this place for her. I believe her inspiration was more a recognition of the potential for depth and magic in every moment of experience, whether it be listening, playing, or any other human endeavor.

It took me some time to arrive at this viewpoint about Pauline. I’ll admit to being a “spiritual” skeptic, having lived through the self-indulgent and shallow spirituality that seemed emblematic of the 60s and 70s.  So, it was with some reluctance that I participated in my first session of Sonic Meditations with Pauline at UCSD’s Center for Music Experiment (then in a WW2-era Quonset hut) in the fall of 1977.   A group of perhaps thirty graduate and undergraduate music students sat on the carpeted floor, and Pauline gave us simple instructions for how to listen and then select our own pitch to sing.  I vividly recall my own transition from guarded observer to immersed participant, as her simple instructions quickly yielded what I can only describe as transcendental sonic and temporal experiences.

Over the course of that year, I participated in a number of additional sessions of Sonic Meditations, as well as some performance events co-created and led by Pauline and her partner at the time, Linda Montano.   In all of these experiences there was, in the transition from observer to participant, a move into a vibrant present moment that for me has always been the goal of performance.

By the early 1980s Pauline had departed from UCSD (simultaneous with the department’s change of emphasis towards computer music technology and a more Euro-centric practice of composition). She became one of the founders, along with Robert Ashley, of New Music America.    This festival, which was almost like a convention or trade show for the experimental wing of American contemporary music, was mounted by a new producing team and in a different city each year.   One could say that John Cage was the godfather of the festival and Pauline the godmother.  I recall that when the collaborating team of each new festival was being developed, Pauline was—with a mix of both humor and deep truth—given the title of the “chaplain,” an acknowledgement that she provided, in addition to leadership and artistic vision, a moral compass for the whole community.

With her passing, we celebrate her life: a complete and uncompromising life lived with inspiration, creativity, compassion, and without boundaries.

The last time I saw Pauline perform was with the Deep Listening Band at a festival of New Albion Records artists at BARD College in the summer of 2008.    It had been a number of years since I had listened to Pauline’s work and some of my skepticism about the “spiritual” resonance around her work had returned.  The DLB closed the multi-day festival (where I had earlier performed In The Name(less) a work for my Invented Instrument Duo with Joel Davel), which was produced in the remarkable Spiegeltent.   There on stage was a grand piano and a large collection of instruments, including Pauline’s big accordion, miscellaneous toys, a trombone, didgeridoo, plastic pipe, reams of electronics, and a trio of “old folks.”   But from the first sound through the entire hour-long performance, Pauline, along with the amazing trombonist Stuart Dempster and pianist David Gamper, wove a dense tapestry of sound (mostly improvised) with such clarity, depth, sensuality, and humor that it came to me that THIS music, which exemplified the “deep listening” aesthetic, was in fact the source and inspiration for numerous other artists’ explorations of drones and slowly evolving musical textures.  I left the concert laughing with pleasure—these “old folks” totally rocked!  And Pauline left us with what “old folks” are supposed to give us:  wisdom.  With her passing, we celebrate her life: a complete and uncompromising life lived with inspiration, creativity, compassion, and without boundaries.

The Electric Heat of Creativity—Remembering Donald Buchla (1937-2016)

Posted on October 26, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

In 1962-63, in a vacated Elizabethan house on Russian Hill, Ramon Sender and I joined our equipment to make a shared studio; this became The San Francisco Tape Music Center. After the house burned down in 1963-64, we moved to Divisadero Street where we spent days and nights wiring a patch bay console we had got in the AT&T graveyard; we needed to tie all our equipment together. A bit like Dr. Frankenstein, we were putting all kinds of discarded equipment together to create an instrument that would allow for the composer to be a “studio artist.” The device or devices could not have an interface that was associated with any traditional music making, especially not a black and white keyboard.  It would have to have the capacity to control all the musical dimensions as equal partners. We thought, we talked, and we read. Our first imagined system came from what we knew about graphic synthesis.

A bit like Dr. Frankenstein, we were putting all kinds of discarded equipment together to create an instrument that would allow for the composer to be a “studio artist.”

We knew the work of Norman McLaren and were aware of many of the other experiments taking place. Drawing seemed like an intriguing approach to a personalized music maker.

We outlined the following process:

• Create a pattern of holes on a flat round disc
• Spin the disc with a variable speed motor.
• Pass light through the rotating disc.
• Convert the resulting light pattern to sound by placing a photo cell to receive the light pattern passing through the disc.

A pattern could be made for each sound; the size of the pattern would represent amplitude; the shape would result in timbre and the speed of rotation would be some kind of frequency change.

Our soldering skills, starting from zero, quickly grew to modest, but, alas, never to excellent nor even good.  Where and how were we to start?

Instead of continuing our Frankensteinian kludge approach to hunting and gathering in electronic graveyards, we decided to put an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle to find someone who might be interested in building our device. The first person to answer the ad seemed to have some sort of eye dysfunction; his eyes were focusing on two different and constantly changing places at the same time. Unaware that the ’60s drug scene had begun, we described what we were after.  The fellow seemed interested and, after waiting several days without another answer to the ad, he was the only one we had. So we gave him a key to the studio and told him to go ahead and see what he could do.  On arriving at the studio the next morning, we were horrified to discover that he had cut a bunch of wires in the back of our newly wired patch-bay. We took back our key and began the tedious task of putting the patch bay back together.

A short time later, another engineer appeared. He seemed quite normal; that is, he appeared to see and hear in appropriate ways.  We presented our idea and, quietly, he said, “Yeah, I can do it.”

The next day he arrived with a machine; a paper disc attached to a little rotary motor mounted on a board and a couple of batteries a flash light, a small loud speaker, and a small amount of circuitry. He turned it on, and it made a nasty sound!!! Amazed and thrilled, we declared, “It Works!” And he dryly responded, “Yeah, but this isn’t the way to do it.”  That was the arrival of Don Buchla!

A handwritten drawing on a piece of graph paper showing the foot pedal, motor, lamp, lens, and audio output for the light synth.

Don Buchla’s original drawing of the Light Synth

After this, Ramon went on to work on upgrading the studio and I immersed myself in the task of understanding what Don was talking about. He introduced me to the world of voltage control. An entirely new vocabulary was suddenly entering my ears.  The only vocabulary I had for musical sounds were a handful of Italian words—piano, forte, crescendo. This new vocabulary consisted of words from outer space—transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes, and integrated circuits.  Don was “the man who fell to earth.”

I bought the Navy manual on electronics, but, after starting it, realized that I had to take a step back and get some basics and bought the Navy manual on electricity!  The bedtime reading was intense. After a few weeks of the basics of electricity, I plunged into the manual on electronics.  After a bit of scanning and surface exploration, I found myself struggling with that new vocabulary of transistors and diodes. It took a lot of aspirin [for the nightly headaches] and searching, to be able to follow what Don was explaining.  The long nights morphed from struggling with the steepest learning curve I have ever experienced to a dialog between myself and Don in an attempt to conceptualize a new composer’s creative tool. With Don’s help, even with only a rudimentary understanding of electronics, it was possible to see the power of control voltage as shaping the energy of musical gestures.  Traditionally the result of the fingers on the keyboard, the arm energizing the bow that energizes the strings of a violin, the air blown into a flute, could be understood as metaphors for gesturally-shaped control voltages. It was elegant; it appeared to satisfy the characteristics of all musical dimensions; pitch, amplitude, timbre, timing, and—a brand new dimension—spacial positioning.

With Don’s help, even with only a rudimentary understanding of electronics, it was possible to see the power of control voltage as shaping the energy of musical gestures.

The idea, suddenly, and without aspirin, was coming into focus. We worked regularly for almost a year; I would describe the functionality I thought was necessary to do something musically and Don would look up as if looking at the ceiling or somewhere within himself, return his gaze to me and say, “I made a module that does that.” Was he saying he made it some time ago and had just remembered it or had he designed it at that moment? I never knew and when I would ask him, he would always just smile; that coy half smile of his. But, somehow, within a few days he would bring me a drawing of the new module.

With every meeting a new module would arrive, and eventually he designed an entire analogue computer-like music making machine. It was all on paper. We would need $500 dollars for him to make it.  With the help of the Rockefeller Foundation we finally were able to pay for the parts.  Don never built a prototype; he just arrived one day with the entire machine. At the bottom of every module it read, “San Francisco Tape Music Center, Inc.”  I was upset that we were suddenly in “business”; “OK” he said, and the next ones he made were called “Buchla and Associates” and the now historic Buchla 100 was born.

Within a few weeks of the delivery and public unveiling of the 100, I moved to New York and installed a large 100 system.  There I worked (played, really) with it continuously creating Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull.  My relationship with Don remained constant, but now, over the phone. I kept finding things that we had not considered or just plain got wrong.

He would say, “I just made a new envelope generator with a pulse out at the end of the envelope.”

“Great, how soon can I get it?”

Don: “I have already mailed it to you.”

I would call him and say, “Could you make a module that would allow me to convert my voice into a control voltage?”

Long pause. No doubt he was looking at the ceiling.

“I have made that.”

A week later one of the first envelope followers arrived and, in addition to knobs, I could use my voice and finger pressure to control all the dimensions of music.

The Buchla 200

The Buchla 200

Within a few years of back and forth additions to the 100, he went on to make, what many of us consider to be the Stradivarius of analog machines, the Buchla 200.

Many of us consider the Buchla 200 to be the Stradivarius of analog machines.

Don had an unusual genius in the creation of interfaces. In adapting our hands to a rectangular piano keyboard, it takes the first several years to master the art of using the thumb. It made sense as the evolution of music and musical instruments morphed together through time.  But, with the explosion of electronic technology in the second half of the 20th century, we no longer needed to be bound to music or the instruments of those traditions; yet the piano keyboard was brought forward and became the instrument for the new technology.  As McLuhan said, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”  Don’s answer to a new interface for a new music was Thunder, his ergonomic interface.

A photo of Buchla's Thunder interface

Buchla’s Thunder

It went on and on, but for me, the three most revolutionary interfaces were: Thunder; Lightning, a baton that could be waved in the air producing a “joy stick” X, Y array of voltages; and his “Kinesthetic Multi-Dimensional Input Port Module with Motion Sensing Rings” that produced X, Y, Z control voltages.

For me, the three most revolutionary Buchla interfaces were Thunder, Lightning, and the Kinesthetic Multi-Dimensional Input Port Module with Motion Sensing Rings.

After a lifetime of designing and building, Don went back to his masterpiece of the 1970s to create the 200e. He had been eager for me to have the 200e but I resisted.  In 2010, my opera Jacob’s Room was going to get its premiere in Austria.  The sponsors wanted me to make a short European tour of solo performances with the video artist, Lillevan, who had done the live video for the opera, but from the late ’80s, I had made a transition to computers and stopped performing in public. So I decided to give the 200e a spin and flew out to spend a few days with Don as he showed me how it worked and I picked the modules I thought I could use.

I took it with me to Europe to tour with Lillevan and made a patch in the hotel the first night I arrived.  With no real time to work with the 200, I had decided to work mostly with sound files on my Mac using Ableton but maybe still use the 200e in some way.  Our first concert was at the Modern Art Museum in Liechtenstein. I did the whole performance with only the Mac, but at the end of the concert, the audience kept cheering, “How about an encore?” Lillevan said. “An encore?! I had never done an encore, what could it be?”  I looked at the 200e, made a few adjustments to the patch and said, “Let’s do it.”  It was as if it was 1966 in my studio on Bleecker Street.  I turned and knobs even repatched as I played.  I was ecstatic; the audience was ecstatic.

Don and I had remained close for 53 years, although for about 30 years, the friendship was without the virtual electric connection we had in the early days.  But since that performance in Liechtenstein until his recent death, we shared again that wonderful electric heat of creativity.

A group of six musicians playing very bizarre looking instruments.

Don’s “popcorn” performance at the 1980 Festival of the Bourges International Institute of Electroacoustic Music.

Ramon and I had brought Don home from the hospital after his cancer treatment and I began to fly out regularly to be with him and his wife Nannick Bonnel. He was determined to live as fully as he could for as long as he could.  Early in his recovery when he was home from the hospital but still not able to walk, I remember calling him from the airport to tell him that I was on my way up to see him in their hilltop house in Berkeley.  My greeting was, as always, the idiotic “How are you doing?”

“Great!” he said, “I just got back from a walk.”

“A walk?” I said in true amazement, “My God! I would have trouble walking on that incredibly steep hill. Where did you walk?”

“Oh,” he answered proudly, “I walked from the bedroom to the kitchen; it didn’t take so long!”

We both laughed.

Over the next several years, with a lot of help from Nannick, he got himself around. Every time I performed in the Bay Area, I stayed with them and he came to performances.  He also did his own performances from time to time and traveled up until the last few years.

Donald Buchla (left) and Morton Subotnick at NAMM.

The picture above is at the NAMM show when he was signing on to a company that would be selling his equipment.  He continued to create complex imaginative modules, the last one being the “Polyphonic Rhythm Generator”; a set of interconnected rings of sequenced pulses which was his homage to the great North Indian Tala tradition! He just kept going.

Toward the end he began using a walker. When I came out to visit, he wanted to go to the Berkeley Museum. It was a very rainy few days, but he walked, one tiny slow step at a time, to their car. Nannick got his wheel chair into the rear while I helped him into the car. I tried to help him, but he waved me off fiercely as he pulled himself slowly from the walker into the front seat.  We went to the museum and I wheeled him from painting to painting; bringing him as close as possible to every painting so that he could see it.

After that, we decided to go to a movie! Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next. It was at a theatre in Berkeley on the 2nd floor without an elevator.  While Nannick found a place to park the car, Don and I walked up those stairs, one painful step after another.  In the theater we had to go up again to get a seat. He sat forward staring at the screen, trying to comprehend and see. After we began the painful steps down.

I saw him again a few months later; Joan was able to make the trip with me. Don was clearly deteriorating rapidly. He wanted to go out to a restaurant where we could see the sunset over San Francisco.  We went, even more painfully, wheelchair to walker, step by step.

He finally gave into the big sleep.  Rest well, my dear friend!

Morton Subotnick and Donald Buchla

One of the last photos of Morton Subotnick and Donald Buchla together.

My Oldest Friend and Best Collaborator: Remembering Richard Peaslee (1930-2016)

Posted on October 12, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

[Ed Note: Richard Peaslee was an extraordinarily prolific composer who worked in many different idioms including orchestral music, band music, soundtracks for film and television, dance, and jazz. But he is perhaps most widely known for his numerous theatrical scores. After learning of his passing at his home in Seattle in late August, we approached his frequent collaborator, playwright/screen writer/director Kenneth Cavander to share his thoughts with us about Peaslee’s music and his personality. The composer’s widow, painter Dixie Peaslee, provided us with these wonderful photos.—FJO]

It all started with a live snake. The live snake appeared in a 1969 production at the Yale Repertory Theater and threatened to steal the show, slithering around the head and shoulders of the lead actor who, to his credit, calmly went on with his performance with the sangfroid and wit the part demanded.

The actor was Alvin Epstein, the play Euripides’s Bacchae, a celebration of Dionysiac possession and the invasion of a civilized culture by forces of demonic power. Accompanying the snake and the bizarre and violent action were music and sound effects that perfectly complemented the sinister, hypnotic atmosphere of the work.

The music and sound were created by Richard (Dick) Peaslee, and it’s how I got to know him. (I had translated the play.)

Actually, I had got to know Dick’s music five years before I met him in person, when I sat in London’s Aldwych Theater entranced, puzzled, and disturbed by another play in which forces from the unconscious were unleashed—Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of Marat/Sade as it was called. (The actual title of the Peter Weiss’s play is 25 words long.)

Richard Peaslee conferring with Peter Brook (director) on the set of Marat/Sade with actors in costume in the background.

Richard Peaslee conferring with Peter Brook (director) on the set of Marat/Sade.

Dick’s music for Marat/Sade catapulted him to the forefront of theater composers. The songs thrummed, jolted, and seduced you with their sweet-sour melodies and jagged rhythms.

At the time, I was just beginning a career in theater and television, and I had never encountered anything like this. It took five years of experimentation with various theatrical forms and a string of personal happenstances and professional zig-zags to bring us together.

So, back to the snake. The production of Bacchae at Yale, directed by Andre Gregory, was a fraught experience for almost everyone, especially the actors whose loyalty was divided between Andre and a co-director who was responsible for the chorus movement. The members of that chorus—graduate students at the Yale School of Drama—were themselves going through the heady rebellions of the ‘60s. And, on top of it all, there was the snake.

In the middle of this tumult was a quiet, thoughtful, slender figure, adjusting sound levels, bringing in musical motifs, percussion beats, and seldom raising his voice above a quiet murmur. He seemed sane, grown up, self-assured, and I decided he was the person I could be compatible with.

“What’s the egg whisk for?’ I asked him.

“Well, you see, I think it would work for the scene where the women tear his head off.”

I swallowed hard and pressed ahead. Dick told me about his work with Brook on Marat/Sade—how he and Brook experimented with creating musical effects from everyday objects, banging spoons on the exposed strings of a grand piano or dragging a metal funnel across a grating in the floor to mimic the sound of a ratchet on a guillotine. His favorite was submerging a struck gong in a large cauldron of hot water. “It produces a perfect glissando,” he told me.

Peaslee writing music on manuscript paper on a table.

That first encounter with Dick encapsulates a lot of the essence of the man. At his core was a quiet and sturdy gentleness, a respect for others, and a grace that may have come from his Quaker upbringing, fortified by an education that took him from the Groton School to Yale to Juilliard.  At the same time, he possessed an openness to the unconventional and untried, along with a streak of irreverent humor and wildness that drew him to subject matter and musical expression outside the mainstream. The better I got to know him, the more clear it became that beneath the outwardly understated and modest gentleman lurked an uninhibited Great God Pan that mostly came out in his music.

After Bacchae, my memory tells me that he wrote the music for another play I translated for the Yale Repertory, Moliere’s Don Juan; this time, no snake, but the hero did go down in flames.

Dick and I kept in touch. He was working with Peter Brook again, notably on Brook’s revolutionary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was continuing to adapt, write, and direct. Then, in 1972, the director of the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts invited me create a show for their Second Company. I chose to adapt some stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron, and to turn it into a musical.

Tentatively, but hopeful, I asked Dick if he would agree to compose the music. I’m not sure why he said yes. I think there was something in Boccaccio’s stories—the setting of a deadly plague, rebelliousness and sexiness in the characters, a group of young people telling stories to each other—that appealed to the mischief in him and provided such an edge to his music. At any rate, whatever the motive, he responded to the tales, with their darkly satiric view of a society collapsing under the threat of a mortal pandemic. In one of them, the abbot of a deliriously corrupt monastery in an obscure village seduces the beautiful wife of a local farmer when she comes to receive absolution in his confessional. The lyrics I wrote were innocent enough, expressing Boccaccio’s sly satire while staying just this side of blasphemy, but Dick added a twist of his own—a backup group of swinging monks, chanting a miserere in a counterpoint blend of plainchant and soft rock.

It was in this production—which went on from Williamstown to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., to other regional theaters, and briefly to New York—that I acquired my education in writing for musical theater, with Dick as my guide, mentor, and artistic lodestone.

I can’t remember a time when Dick presented me with a melody, or even a musical phrase, and said, “See if you can make your lyrics fit what I’ve written.” Invariably, he would wait for me to present him with the lyrics first, and then, a few days later, come back with a draft of the song. And then, subtly, gently, but with a persuasive mix of demonstration on the piano and tapping out of rhythms, he would show me how the lyric could be improved, expanded, edited, and dramatized in ways I had never imagined when I drafted it.

For a while after that, our paths diverged. Then, a couple of years later, Dick called me and suggested I come over and listen to something he’d been working on.

Around that time, composers were experimenting with synthesizers. Dick liked gadgets, and the synthesizer was the ultimate musical gadget. His apartment had been rigged up with four enormous loudspeakers, each as tall as an average citizen of New York City, and from these Dick could project an effect of being enveloped in quadrophonic music and sound effects that summoned aggrieved thuds on his walls from the neighbors in adjacent apartments. I don’t believe he ever connected these pieces into one organic composition, but for me they were fascinating as a way to subtly change the listener’s perception of reality.

Richard Peaslee performing on an upright piano with a synthesizer on top of it.

Richard Peaslee performing on piano and synthesizers.

At the time I had become interested in the Arthurian cycle, the mysterious tales, some by anonymous authors, of the Knights of the Round Table. I had an invitation to go back to Williamstown with another production, so the following summer the monster speakers and all Dick’s electronic equipment were loaded into his car and set up in the space provided for us—a school auditorium on the edge of the Williams College campus. In keeping with the eclectic nature of the synthesizer experiments, we strung together a group of stories from the legends and let the actors immerse themselves in the music. There were no lyrics, no songs, just the music and the action, with the music assuming the role of an independent actor in its own right.

That created an interesting dilemma.  With no live musicians to take visual cues from the actors, it was up to the actors to time their lines, movements, entrances, and exits according to the often complex rhythms and shifts of mood Dick had created in his recorded pieces.  This was before the era of computerized soundboards, and in any case we were working with a shoe-string budget. The only way the two elements—the actors’ performances and Dick’s music—could be coordinated was through the dexterity and concentration of a stage manager operating the switches and volume controls of the tape machine. All this was made even more complicated by the time lag between the reactions of the stage manager at the controls, the activation of the tape machine, and the emergence of the sound from the speakers.

It was the only time I heard Dick curse.

Nevertheless, the Arthurian legends had captured our imagination. They returned in a more conventional form to fulfill a commission for the Lincoln Center Institute. This time we left the synthesizer in the apartment and Dick went back to a score to be played by live musicians.

Once again, though, he felt the urge to play with stage conventions. In one scene, the hero Sir Gawain is subjected to a humiliating duel with an Invisible Knight. But how to represent this on stage, short of an unconvincing display of an actor slashing the air with a sword? Dick had a solution. He had a soft spot for the French horn. This was a golden opportunity to indulge it. He decided to bring one of the musicians on stage and make the sound of the instrument represent Gawain’s unseen adversary. It was both scary and a bit disturbing, though it wasn’t a solution that was practical for every production of the work.

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that the main reason Dick wanted to do this was so that, in future printed versions of the piece, the stage direction could read EXIT, PURSUED BY A FRENCH HORN.

Richard Peaslee at his home studio.

Richard Peaslee at his home studio in Seattle, 2010.

The last time I saw Dick, he was physically limited by the progress of the multiple sclerosis that disabled him in his later years. We talked over a long lunch in Seattle, his wife Dixie joined us, and though he couldn’t say much himself I felt strongly that his quickness of mind and humor were alive and well.

As I left Dixie confirmed for me that indeed the Dick I had known for nearly half a century was still there. She told me that only the other day, as he was leaving their apartment and passed a vase of carnations that were wilting and drooping from being left too long, he looked at the flowers and commented, “They look like they need a reincarnation.”

And that is how I think of him, reincarnated every time I listen to his music.

Peaslee (center) on the stage of Alice Tully Hall in 1989 with (starting on the left) cellist Eugene Friesen, composer Peter Schickele, choreographer Martha Clarke, singer Jim Naughton, and orchestrator Bruce Coughlin at the end of the Composers' Showcase tribute to Richard Peaslee.

Peaslee (center) on the stage of Alice Tully Hall in 1989 with (starting on the left) cellist Eugene Friesen, composer Peter Schickele, choreographer Martha Clarke, singer Jim Naughton, and orchestrator Bruce Coughlin at the end of the Composers’ Showcase tribute to Richard Peaslee.

Remembering Connie Crothers (1941-2016)

Posted on September 9, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

I always had a deep feeling as I still do to be one with the very minute I’m in.

While doing research during my first stay in New York in 1995, feminist blues record producer Rosetta Reitz handed me an LP Perception and told me to check out Connie Crothers.  I had compiled texts about women jazz instrumentalists and perused decades’ worth of jazz magazines in order to create an annotated bibliography for the Jazz Institute in Darmstadt.  Still, I had never heard of her. (An interview in the Village Voice existed, which she later gave me, but she had not been featured in any jazz magazine).

Connie agreed to my request to interview her for my dissertation, and I went to hear the Connie Crothers Quartet—which included Richard Tabnik, Sean Smith, and Roger Mancuso—at Cleopatra’s Needle.  Deeply moved by the tight band, their fast, swinging, effortless unison lines and seamless move between composition and improvisation, I felt this was a true new musical discovery and wondered why this band was not touring the jazz festival circuit all over the country. The band played original compositions by Connie and standards.  Several of her pieces are based on changes of standards,  with a bebop feel, yet with her own expression.

Connie invited me to her apartment on 9th Street near Astor Place and we talked for hours.  I learned how as a child prodigy she was trained at the piano to perform classical music and that she set out to study composition. Then she recalled her radical move to New York upon listening to Lennie Tristano’s Requiem, a bluesy tune and homage to Charlie Parker.  Connie had dropped her studies in Berkeley, traveled to the East Coast, and formally studied with Tristano for six years.   She immersed herself, studying countless hours every day, rethinking everything from the fingering of scales to how to hold the hands, how to approach a jazz tune or approach open form. It took her several years of profound study before she would perform in public.

I never improvised, though, that is a story also.  When I decided that I wanted to be a jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising. I could really play by then, I was a good player, I was a very highly trained player, and I could play big works. I could sit at the piano and a lot of music could come out of the piano, and all that was wonderful, I appreciated it, but this was my moment of truth: I sat down at my piano with the desire to improvise, and I sat there for, oh, twenty minutes, a half hour. I could not improvise one note. And in that moment, I became angry. I realized that as much as I had given, and as much as people had given to me to learn, that this dimensional thing had been left out, and I was totally blocked. I was facing a wall, and I felt like I had been so deeply deprived of something that was so important. Not that anybody did that to me. It’s in the classical music culture—it wasn’t always like that, those great composers could improvise! It’s a deep story.  So, the thing that I credit myself with in retrospect is that in that moment I did not fake it.  I knew I couldn’t improvise, and I didn’t. I faced it.  It was rough. (…) I faced the enormity head on right away.  I took it in that I could not do it.

In her last decade Connie Crothers had become a profoundly admired and sought-after improviser.

To me, this statement was a powerful testament to her seriousness as an improviser.  She recalled how she eventually began to perform solo, and to experience rejection from the audience. She also offered reasons why her band would not perform more frequently.  She was adamant that it had to do with the divide in the jazz world—jazz tunes versus free jazz/free improvisation—and with the fact that she was a woman leader and would be hired less often because of it. (She explained that in the 1960s there was virtually no literature on women´s rights and highlighted that Lennie Tristano was ahead of his time: “Long before he was hip, I would say that Lennie was a feminist.” She felt that he took her seriously on a deeper level than she had experienced with her previous teachers, and that she was struck by the difference.)  Neither fitting the expectations of a jazz audience or of a downtown free improvising one, the band had by that time somewhat accepted that performances would be few; however, they rehearsed every week at Connie’s.  Fortunately, in her last decade she had become a profoundly admired and sought-after improviser.

Connie Crothers at the piano.

After our interview, I was determined to take lessons from her eventually.  Some years later, I was able to do so and came to her loft in Williamsburg.  I had not been living in New York for long at that point and was still developing my own playing, improving my standard chops  and free improvising.  Though I had taken various workshops as a student in Germany, Connie showed me a new level of profound dedication to studying and a range of new conceptual ideas, many of which she’d credit to Lennie Tristano: to connect with the melody of a tune through singing, to improve touch on the piano, to work on sound, to breathe, to play scales and melodies with new fingerings, to learn a huge variety of voicings, and, most importantly, to feel the music on a deeper level, to feel the energy of the piano.  She was puzzled by how most characterizations of Lennie Tristano would be about his technique rather than his way of teaching a deep feeling of the music.  (Tristano, well known for his dedication to teaching, would give lessons and students would be around waiting for their turn, as lessons could last for drastically different lengths of time, depending on what the student brought and needed.)

Connie showed me a new level of profound dedication to studying and a range of new conceptual ideas.

Connie had her own unique, personal way of teaching.  While she often mentioned how Lennie would see a particular approach and made it clear how much she had learned from him, which ideas were developed by him, why she would recommend a particular thought at this moment, she would always go with everyone’s personal needs, wishes, and ideas. She saw me as an individual and made me feel special to her.  By many accounts, she had this very outstanding ability to make the musicians, students, and friends around her feel special.  Many of us developed a personal relationship far beyond a standard student-teacher rapport.  A lesson would often begin with a conversation about anything from musical to personal to political to philosophical.  Two chairs were set, just a bit away from the piano.  She’d sit on the one closer to the piano, the student would be closer to the stereo. I’d often put a CD into it with the track I’d be singing for her.

Lennie Tristano thought that his discovery of asking students to sing with the great recorded solos was his most important discovery of his teaching life. As he explained it to me, he thought that before he knew about this, he could teach theory to his gifted students and they could be very accomplished, but he could not teach true spontaneous improvisation. Singing with records does this. When you sing with one of the great early innovators—after you’ve done it enough—you will internalize what the feeling is of spontaneous improvisation. You will also discover and release an energy that can only be found there. It is dimensional. It can’t be described verbally and it can’t be reached by practicing some kind of musical procedure. I recommend singing with the great innovators of the early decades of jazz. They were all spontaneously improvising their great solos, and this was their context. Spontaneous improvisation was the jazz world norm then, as well as the requirement to express individuality.

(excerpted from a Connie Crothers workshop handout)

After singing, I’d go to the piano and she’d listen and make suggestions.  More and more, a friendship outside of the lesson developed.  She remembered conversations. She’d recommend something and occasionally push me. Most vividly, I remember my anxiety about performing solo.  I did not feel ready.  Connie curated a concert series at The Stone and invited me to perform solo.  She knew I had three quite active duos at the time and was very comfortable in those and in larger groups. She said:  “I want YOU to perform. I want to hear you play, not with a duo, by yourself.”  She talked about how wonderful an energy I’d feel from the audience, which would inspire me. I followed through and played a solo set with my compositions spread through an improvised set.  No other teacher had done such a thing for me.  She’d come to my gigs.  When nobody else would make the effort to come to a gig at a small venue that was hard to reach, Connie would get on the subway and be there.

In the earlier years I knew her, she was very dedicated to her quartet and to other close associates. After Tristano died in 1978, many of his students kept in contact and there is a network of mutual support and respect that is still intact today. Of all his students, Connie was probably the most active in continuing Tristano’s legacy. New Artists Records provided an outlet for like-minded musicians. Her first release on New Artists was an album of piano and percussion duos with Max Roach entitled entitled Swish (NA1001), which they recorded in 1982. Max thought highly of Connie and they had planned to release a second one. Sessions on Haywood Road, also recorded in 1982, unfortunately remains unreleased. Although they did not get to perform publicly, Connie and Max remained very close, particularly during the last years of his life.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the quartet stayed together, but performances were sparse. Connie taught a large circle of students and stayed immersed in music; however, she craved being out there and performing more frequently.  Around ten years ago, Jemeel Moondoc hired her, which introduced her to a new audience.  From then on, she’d be more and more embraced by the communities around Arts for Art, the Vision Festival, Roulette, and The Stone.  In just a few years she played and recorded with many outstanding musicians.  She brought trumpeter Roy Campbell into her quartet. Band of Fire can be heard on New Artists Records, a collective label she co-founded.  She was very affected by Roy’s passing and doubled her efforts to play, perform, teach, support others.  The New Artists Records catalogue has been expanding dramatically in the past few years. She was very dedicated to the label, which fortunately will continue under the auspices of pianist Virg Dzurinko. There have been many more interviews with her. She had been a frequent guest at radio stations, Adam Melville wrote a term paper about her teaching (Rutgers University), and Chris Becker interviewed her for his book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women In Jazz (Beckeresque Press, 2015).

In 2013, I moved away from New York to Kassel, Germany.  Our friendship grew to another level.  We saw each other during every stay of mine in New York, went to concerts together, heard each other’s gigs, performed a piano duo at the Firehouse Space in Williamsburg. In February of 2015, she came to Kassel for a solo concert at the Theater im Fridericianum and a workshop at the Institute of Music at Universität Kassel.  She stayed with my kids and I for those days and we treasured those memories—singing “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” with a record of Billie Holiday as a duo at the workshop; Connie sang Lester Young’s part and I sang Billie’s. Or, on the beautiful, sunny morning of her concert, walking through the Bergpark, covered with snow.  She walked and hopped around with such ease, everything about her was full of life.  I still cannot imagine that she is no longer walking and hopping around like this. This was supposed to be the beginning of much more to come!  She played a piece at night inspired by the waterfalls and birds and my children.

Fortunately, I had seen her more often that usual in these past months. As hard as it was to see her so weak, feeling the energy of the New York music community toward her was tremendous.  I am grateful to have been a part of a wonderful circle of friends who supported her.  Grateful to have seen her well and less well over the past months, to have been with her on her last day, hospitalized, breathing hard. To spend time with other close friends of hers at the hospital.  Some I know well, some I hardly knew at all, it did not seem to matter—we all felt connected through Connie, and Connie was surrounded by love at any moment.

She died later during that night. Strangely enough, she remains very present—many friends shared thoughts on social media, WKCR did a memorial broadcast almost immediately, WBAI did a memorial broadcast, The New York Times ran an obituary.  I began writing these words on my flight, in this surreal situation between different worlds, in a strange moment of time.  Listening to the WBAI radio broadcast I hear her voice talking about familiar subjects.  I sit at the piano and feel her presence. On September 17, during a larger cultural event in the city of Kassel, my musical contribution will be dedicated to her.

Ursel Schlicht and Connie Crothers

Ursel Schlicht and Connie Crothers

(Ed Note: Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Connie Crothers herein derive from Ursel Schlicht’s extensive interviews with her, many of which have been published in Schlicht’s book, “It’s Gotta Be Music First”: Zur Bedeutung, Rezeption und Arbeitssituation von Jazzmusikerinnen (On the Impact, Perception and Working Situation of Women Jazz Musicians), Karben: Coda, 2000. A complete list of Crothers’s recordings is available on Crothers’s website.—FJO)

California Sunshine: Remembering Bobby Hutcherson (1941-2016)  

Posted on August 23, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

1963 black and white Blue Note Records photo by Francis Wolff of Bobby Hutcherson playing vibraphone during a recording session.

[Ed. note: Los Angeles-born composer and vibraphonist Robert “Bobby” Hutcherson passed away from emphysema in his home in Montara, California, on August 15, 2016. He recorded a total of 43 albums as a leader, 23 of which were released on Blue Note Records, and appeared as a sideman on more than 100 others, among them many of the seminal 1960s Blue Note LPs, including Out to Lunch (1964), Eric Dolphy’s landmark final recording as a leader in the United States, Joe Henderson’s Mode for Joe (1966), Grant Green’s Idle Moments (1963), Grachan Moncur III’s Evolution (1963), and three albums by Jackie McLean. His own albums ranged from numerous sessions for small combos to a live Hollywood Bowl performance featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One of his most unusual recordings was a 1982 Contemporary album, Solo/Quartet, which juxtaposed a quartet session—featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Billy Higgins—with a series of multi-tracked original compositions in which Hutcherson performed on vibes, marimba, xylophone, bells, chimes, and boo-bam. In his later years, Hutcherson appeared on Lou Rawls’s At Last (1989), Donald Byrd’s gospel-tinged A City Called Heaven (1991), Abbey Lincoln’s Wholly Earth (1999), and two albums by Kenny Garrett—Happy People (2001) and Beyond the Wall (2006). He was also a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective, playing with them from 2004 to 2007 and appearing on their first six albums. On his final recording as a leader, Enjoy the View (2014), he was joined by saxophonist David Sanborn, drummer Bill Hart, and Joey DeFrancesco who performed on both trumpet and organ in a collection of eight original compositions by various members of the group. In 2010, Hutcherson was named an NEA Jazz Master.

In Andrew Gilbert’s August 15 obituary of Bobby Hutcherson, he quotes an earlier interview he did with Hutcherson in which the musician credited Joe Chambers, a percussionist and composer who appeared on ten of Hutcherson’s records as a leader, with “encouraging him to start generating his own music as a vehicle for documenting creative evolution—‘in order to complete your cycle you have to write.’” The second of those Hutcherson albums featuring Chambers, Components (released in 1966), juxtaposes a side of Hutcherson originals (including what is perhaps his most famous one, “Little B’s Poem”) with a side of Chambers originals. So it seemed most appropriate for us to approach Chambers, who is currently writing his autobiography, to share his thoughts about his long-term collaborator and friend.—FJO]

It is with a heavy heart, and a feeling of hesitation and great loss, that I approach this essay. In fact, I decided to pause writing to look at a video of Bobby with a quartet just sent to me.

Bobby arrived in New York around 1961, before me, touring with the Al Grey-Billy Mitchell group. I first met him in the summer of 1962 when he was performing with the Jackie McLean Quartet at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D.C. The group was Jackie McLean, Eddie Khan, Tony Williams, and Bobby Hutcherson. The absence of piano placed Hutcherson in the role of accompanist as well as soloist. To perform that role as a mallet player requires the skill to manipulate four to five mallets.  He was the first vibist I ever saw do this, well before Gary Burton appeared on the scene.

Another observation: Hutcherson had his own distinct tone and sound on the instrument, very different from the prominent mallet players of the day Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson.  When I made the move to New York from D.C. in the fall of 1963, I crossed paths with him again. Eric Dolphy assembled a group consisting of Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Richard Davis, and myself on drums.  We did a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that was recorded live.  Several producers are, to this day, looking for those tapes; I have no idea where these tapes are.

I became a kind of house recording drummer for Blue Note Records after joining Freddie Hubbard’s group in 1964 and recording Hubbard’s Breaking Point. After that, Bobby and I were teamed on recordings led by Joe Henderson (Mode for Joe) and Andrew Hill (Compulsion), then subsequently nine Bobby Hutcherson-led recordings for Blue Note. After the albums Components, Dialogue, and Now, a working group consisting of Harold Land, Stanley Cowell, Reggie Johnson, and myself was formed around 1968. Alfred Lion and Frank Wolf at Blue Note did not care what you played, as long as they could extract a song from the program that could be put on the jukebox. The jukebox industry of the 1950s and ’60s is part of what kept jazz very prominently in the public eye, way more in those days than now.

We used to call Bobby “Tranquil,” he was so easy going and even tempered—completely opposite of what was going on in the country and the world in the 1960s.

We used to call Bobby “Tranquil,” he was so easy going and even tempered—completely opposite of what was going on in the country and the world in the 1960s. And working with him was just as I described his personality. It was at this time, well before the inception of the percussion group M’Boom, that I began to consider learning and performing on mallets. I attribute this to Bobby Hutcherson. He often asked me for drum exercise books; I wondered why.  He said it was “to strengthen his wrists and fingers.”  He also suggested we form a group of just drums and mallets, a precursor to the concept realized by Max Roach five years later, in the group M’Boom. He relocated to San Francisco around the “flower children” time. It’s a wonder he stayed in New York as long as he did; he was truly California sunshine.

A lot has been written and said about his playing but not enough about his composing and musical philosophy. To me, he is one of the most important conceptualizers of music in the last half of the 20th century. His compositions are a marvel of sophistication, harmonic and melodic innovation, and imagination. Bobby Hutcherson was a visionary musician.

The last time I was in touch with Bobby was last year when I was in San Diego. Even in 2015, Bobby was not in good shape; he was barely able to talk, suffering from Alzheimer’s as well as emphysema. We just talked about the old days, as best as he could. But it was not good for me to see him like that.

Goodbye, Bobby. Someday we will meet again.

1965 black and white Blue Note Records photo by Francis Wolff of Joe Chambers playing drums during a recording session.

Photo of Joe Chambers by Francis Wolff taken during the 1965 recording sessions for Wayne Shorter’s Blue Note LP, Et Cetera, released in 1980.(Courtesy of Mosaic Images.)

Complex but Emotional—Remembering Ursula Mamlok (1923-2016)

Posted on May 24, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

Ursula Mamlok at the piano (Photo by Simon Pauly)
Libelle,
wie kamst Du in meinen Garten?
Warum bliebst Du nicht dort,
wo Du zu Hause-
im grünen Schilf am See?
Lockte der Duft der Rosen
das tiefe Blau an knorrigen Ästen?

Oder hast Du mich,
einst auch von fernen Ufern,
nur einmal besuchen wollen?
Dich trug bloß der Wind;
mich brachte der Sturm.

Dragon fly,
how did you find my garden?
Why didn’t you stay
where you belong–
in the lake’s green reeds?
Did the scent of roses tempt you,
the blue on gnarled branches?

Or did you come
just to visit me,
who also came from distant shores?
The wind carried you;
the storm brought me.

A fragment from Der Andreas Garten, poems by Dwight Mamlok (Ursula’s husband) and text of the composition with the same name.

Ursula Mamlok: Der Andreas Garten (1987) – V. “Libelle”
The Jubal Trio: Christine Schadeberg, soprano; Sue Ann Kahn, flute; Susan Jolles, harp
From Music of Ursula Mamlok (NWCR806)

Ursula Mamlok, an outstanding composer and my beloved teacher and friend, passed away in Berlin on May 4, 2016. She had moved back to Berlin in 2006.

Ursula Mamlok’s music was transparent but expressive, complex but emotional.

Mamlok was distinguished by her elegant chamber music, and her extensive catalogue of music that includes percussion. She also wrote several works for orchestra. Many of these works have been recorded by Bridge Records, including

One of the last things she did was to arrange her composition, 2000 Notes (originally written for piano in 2000), for percussion trio. She attended the premiere at the beginning of April 2016, shortly before her death.

In the early ’90s, while I was completing my doctoral degree at Temple University, my teacher Matthew Greenbaum suggested that I study with Mamlok for two semesters. I feel deeply grateful for that suggestion. I came to know both Mamlok and her husband, Dwight, who wrote poetry and short stories. That was the beginning of a long friendship. Dwight wrote the poems for Der Andreas Garten (1987), one of her finest compositions.

Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923 and left in early 1939, a few months after Kristallnacht. Her destination, and that of her mother and adoptive father (her father died when she was a baby) was Guayaquil, Ecuador. Her grandparents stayed in Germany and died in the Holocaust, as did her teacher, Gustav Ernest (Gustav Seeligsohn), with whom she had studied piano, theory, and composition in Berlin during the 1930s.

Ursula Mamlok: Stray Birds (1963) – IV. In a Melancholy Mood
Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano; Harvey Sollberger, flute; Fred Sherry, cello
From Music of Ursula Mamlok, Volume 3 (Bridge 9360)

Guayaquil may have been a haven, but it was hardly a center of musical life. Mamlok (then Ursula Lewy) was able to come to the United States in order to continue her music education at the Mannes School of Music. There she studied with composer/conductor George Szell from 1940 to 1943. She later studied with Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music from 1956 to 1958. In the early 1960s, Mamlok studied with Stefan Wolpe (1960-61) and Ralph Shapey (1962-64), who helped her to develop her mature style and technique.

In the beginning, I didn’t know many details about her or her husband’s life. They had married in 1947. Dwight (Dieter) was born in Hamburg, and had escaped to Sweden around the same time Ursula left Berlin. He came to the United States after World War II, and by serendipity they found each other in California. Visiting them through the years, I would, sometimes, find her distressed about passages in a composition she was working on, and I couldn’t avoid noticing how protective Dwight was of her profession and her music.

Coming from Colombia, where I had only heard about one other woman composer of classical music before me, I didn’t realize—in all its dimensions—what it would mean for me to study with her. It took me a long time to realize the levels of her strength.

I met her when she was in her early 70s, and initially I didn’t know how to define her. Who was she? Coming from Colombia, where I had only heard about one other woman composer of classical music before me, I didn’t realize—in all its dimensions—what it would mean for me to study with her. It took me a long time to realize the levels of her strength.

She was soft-spoken, tender, and showed a little bit of the fragility that passing time leaves in our older selves. She had survived cancer in the 1980s, when she was in her 60s. I realized that we shared a similarity—the fact that we arrived relatively late in the United States. I came when I was 29, and she came when she was 17. When she went back to get her master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music, she felt a little awkward, being much older than the other students, and reduced her age by five years. She admitted this jokingly later on in her life, in that chirpy and humorous way that both she and Dwight had.

Ursula Mamlok: String Quartet #1 (1962/63) – I. With Intensity
Daedalus String Quartet:
Kyu-Young Kim and Min-Young Kim, violins; Jessica Thompson, viola; Roman Ramakrishnan, cello
From Music of Ursula Mamlok, Volume 1 (Bridge 9291)

We shared the fact of having a duality in our identities that would accompany our lives forever, and maybe that drew me closer to her. She went back to Germany in 2006 when she was 83, one year after the death of her husband. Was that what made her go back to Berlin after having such painful memories there? For me, that was a proof of her strength even if she complained about loneliness when I called her in Berlin. She was emotionally a very strong person and an exceptional composer. She missed her friends back in New York, but her mood would change as soon as she began talking about the composition she was working on. She became a vital and happy soul when she talked about the concerts of her music that she had attended recently or the ones that were coming. During her last years, her compositional language became much simpler, but remained expressive and playful.

In a 1998 interview with Neil Levin, Mamlok gave important information about the evolution of her language. Talking about her early compositions, she said, “I was a composer of tonal music with extended harmonies. But later on, not much later than that, I got interested in twelve-tone music. I felt that you have to do these things. . . . I came to know music of a different style. But it is probably the same music I wrote before, only with a different technique and I still do that. . . . My music is basically lyrical, but also maybe dramatic.”

Later in the interview, she clarified, “In my music there are tonal centers, but it depends how you use the technique. I still like very much the background of the tonal music. . . . My atonal music and twelve-tone music is not that of Schoenberg or other composers who are very dissonant.”

Interview by Neil Levin on February 24, 1998

During the first or second class I took with her, she showed me a sheet of graph paper on which she had written out the magic square for one of her compositions. She explained to me how she structured her pieces before she began to write them. She also told me that she was not very strict in her approach.

Ursula Mamlok: Five Capriccios for oboe and piano (1968) – I. Quarter note = 100
Heinz Holliger, oboe; Anton Kernjak, piano
From Music of Ursula Mamlok, Volume 3 (Bridge 9360)

When I saw the magic square, I felt I was in trouble. In the first composition class I took as an undergraduate student of music theory, I had to compose short compositions or phrases experimenting with different techniques and scales: whole-tone, diatonic, modal, and twelve-tone. Yet despite all my love for the transparency, artistry, and beauty of Anton Webern’s music, I didn’t feel comfortable writing music using predetermined series of pitch classes.

As I froze, not saying anything, Mamlok, in her cautious, elegant, and cheerful manner, said that she wanted to share her score, but that her students could compose in a manner in which they felt comfortable. I took a breath and relaxed. I appreciated her openness.

Ursula Mamlok: Woodwind Quintet (1956): III. Allegro Molto
Windscape: Tara Helen O’Connor, flute/piccolo; Randall Ellis, oboe; Alan R. Kay, clarinet; Frank Morelli, bassoon; and
David Jolley, horn
From Music of Ursula Mamlok, Volume 1 (Bridge 9291)

The lessons continued, always having a positive tone. At the end, there was always time to eat together, sitting at the table: Ursula, Dwight, and his little parakeet, sitting on his head or on the table; Dwight always fed sponge cake to the parakeet. Dwight loved birds, and birds gravitated toward him, according to a story he had told me. When I took the train back to Philadelphia, I always had a smile on my face. Their humorous stories were on my mind, the sounds of their words and their accents in my ears. I was not the only one with a heavy accent. Maybe secretly I felt good about it.

Both of them captivated me.

Dwight and Ursula Mamlok. (Photo by Alex Shapiro)

Dwight and Ursula Mamlok. (Photo by Alex Shapiro)

One comment I heard continuously from her was the fact that she had learned, and kept learning, by attending concerts. A critical ear was something I had from an early age, a quality that was enriched especially by an important clarinet teacher when I was in Colombia. Now she was emphasizing how important it was to simply listen to music. She attended many concerts, and Dwight was always with her. The adorable couple.

Whenever she was interviewed before a concert, she would be playful but strong. What I realized throughout the years is that she defended her place as a composer with conviction. The little fragility I occasionally perceived at their apartment would vanish, and she was there protecting her music in front of the public, with strength that was often combined with doses of cheerfulness.

During her final years in Berlin, she sometimes felt lonely. I would call her every other week and I could hear in her voice that she was excited to hear from me. She enjoyed immensely the occasional visits of old friends from New York or her new friends from Germany. At the Tertianum Residenz, an assisted living facility where she lived, there were many people of her generation but she still felt a sense of not belonging.

Until the very end of her life she was always involved in small music projects and I could hear in her voice a youthful happiness and sparkling energy when she described them. Music was her lasting companion.

Concerto for Oboe and Chamber Orchestra (1976) – I. Spirited
Heinz Holliger, oboe; Ensemble SurPlus conducted by James Avery
From Music of Ursula Mamlok, Volume 1 (Bridge 9291)

When I visited the Mamlok’s New York apartment, I spoke occasionally with Barry Wiener, the musicologist who dedicated much of his time to studying Mamlok’s music in the years immediately preceding her departure from New York. He looked at her older pieces, and helped her to complete the massive process of revising and/or editing more than two dozen forgotten scores that became an important part of her catalogue. When she moved back to Berlin, Bettina Brand, her manager and friend, successfully promoted many of these works in Germany, and she became a celebrated figure in the musical world. In New York, Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer repeatedly championed her music.

Mamlok created a unique, sophisticated voice while absorbing many influences. She used twelve-tone rows together with Wolpe’s methods of pitch organization. She included thirds and triads, and disguised consonant intervals preceding or following dissonances. She played with the rows as if she were playing chess, anticipating the move of the players–her notes full of elegance and expressivity.

Tony Conrad (1940-2016): Writing “Minor” History

Posted on April 26, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

I only met Tony Conrad twice—once after a performance at Issue Project Room in September 2014, and again, almost exactly a year later, at his apartment in Buffalo in August 2015. The second time I had come to interview him as part of my dissertation research on authorship in early minimalism. He was—as those who knew him much better have consistently portrayed him—funny, painfully intelligent, generous with his time (we spent about eight hours together), respectful of those with whom he has worked over the years, and impatient with praise or questions that read too far into his own career and ideas.

In his book Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, art historian Branden Joseph argued for Conrad as someone too complex, heterogeneous, and self-critical in his work to allow for the formation of a heroic “major” narrative. Joseph’s brilliant book presents an artist who aimed always to work at the margins, and in response to whom a straightforward “life and works” biography would do a great disservice. Nevertheless, the major narrative has appeared: particularly in obituaries, it leaps across a number of media, always carefully noting his problematization of authorship. But still, we can now trace a line that connects The Theatre of Eternal Music to early films like the Flicker and Straight and Narrow, before diverting to Germany to discuss his album with Faust, the Yellow Movies, his 1980s work in public access television, and his 1990s return to recording. That this narrative leaves out important works is inevitable—this is the case in any posthumous overview of an artistic career.

As a musicologist, I’ve been consistently impressed by Tony’s work as a theorist and historian of music—the way he has created critical foundations for his own work, within the long history of Western art music, all the while undercutting and mocking those very conditions of possibility.

Still, across all of this outpouring of attention, a few roles have taken center stage: filmmaker, violinist, and teacher/collaborator. As someone who met him relatively recently, and spoke to him as a researcher, I would like to uphold some level of the “minor” status Joseph attributes to Conrad by leaving aside his films and music. As a musicologist, I’ve been consistently impressed by Tony’s work as a theorist and historian of music—the way he has created critical foundations for his own work, within the long history of Western art music, all the while undercutting and mocking those very conditions of possibility. The avant-garde lineage within which he articulated his work is one of both depth and contingency. It is revered and mocked simultaneously, with Conrad enjoying the spoils of the tradition while outlining its unspoken power structures (and offering guidance in how to topple them).

How did he do this? The answer is strewn across an entire career’s writings and interviews. Anyone reading along the last few weeks is surely now aware of the extensive liner notes from his 1997 Early Minimalism, including his infamous assertion that “history is like music—completely in the present.” In those essays, Conrad framed a polemical narrative of his work with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale in the original Theatre of Eternal Music as a deliberative and democratic collective rather than as a group formed, as historians like K. Robert Schwarz have written elsewhere, for the sole purpose of performing drones under Young. Perhaps most powerfully, Conrad ties his travels in the avant-garde to the Western canon in an entirely novel way, drawing on the influence of the 17th-century violinist-composer Heinrich Biber, whose music Tony claims he heard as organized according to timbre and tuning rather than harmony or melody.

Tony Conrad holding violin

Tony Conrad. (Photo by Bettina Herzner, courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery.)

Similarly, as Jeremy Grimshaw has argued, with the earlier CD Slapping Pythagoras, Conrad criticized Young in the guise of Pythagoras for substituting “a Theology of Numbers for the pragmatics of counting.” He considers this a profoundly anti-democratic confiscation of political potential from regular people, and shows how this initial theft becomes the organizing principle of specialized Western music against the heterophonic principles of community music-making. The articulation of this argument is, as with everything Tony did, paradoxical, messy, even silly, as it shifts between first-person attack and a more “objective” historical voice. He seems to have developed some of these ideas in the less publicly available works to which scattered reference can be found online, such as “Inducting Lully” and “Roughing Up Rameau.” This series of projects—as much scholarly as artistic—articulated a relationship between Western art music, tuning, and power that is perhaps Tony’s central theoretical contribution. Most importantly, it has inspired generations of musicians and artists, not only introducing to them the mathematics of just intonation and tuning, but doing so in such a way that is attached to the critique of power in art music.

This mode of anti-authority historiography continued outside of writing: it existed equally in his archival releases of his own music and that of others. His small imprint Audio ArtKive provided a number of releases that were avant-garde and probably unsellable even by the exceptional standards of their parent label, Table of the Elements. Several of the pieces on the three-CD set New York in the 1960s—archival recordings made with John Cale and others from the circle around 56 Ludlow St. (Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, among others)—show their effort to formulate a new music making that was neither sole-authored nor purely “improvisation” in the wake of what Conrad saw as the post-Cagean challenge. The recordings show, more than anything else available, the problem of marking a strong dividing line between, for example, The Theatre of Eternal Music and the Velvet Underground, or treating Young as an inherent influence on the latter, or placing those two groups as obvious examples of an “avant-garde” and a “popular” impulse towards similar ideas. Similarly, the three Jack Smith CDs are incredible documents of the interaction between those same musicians and the experimental film scene occurring in that same apartment. To shift the locus of historical writing—which has yet to happen, at least in musicological thought on the period—from Young’s apartment at 275 Church St. to Conrad, Cale, and Smith’s at 56 Ludlow reveals an entirely different relationship to performance, labor, time, and intermedial influence.

We can further expand Tony’s mode of historiography into his “writing” in public space. One of my favorite examples of his historical practice—which is also a political practice, and an artistic one—comes up in an interview he conducted by email in 1996 with Brian Duguid of EST Magazine. Asked about the times he picketed performances by Young in Buffalo in 1990, Conrad explained himself in this way:

But picketing—picketing for or against something, and handing out literature—these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication. Yes, I am “in communication” with La Monte Young, of course, when I picket and he is there to perform his public action—but by clearly shaping my own action as “picketing,” even though there is only me there, I am making my action interpretable only as a public or political action, not as a private communication. What I’m trying to say is that both the message conveyed through my picketing, and the picketing itself, were not communications primarily intended for La Monte Young personally. They were communications which took place on the public level, which is the level of culture, of symbolic statement. These were symbolic or formal statements, which are as much a part of “Music” as this interview is—even though this interview is actually silent, and we aren’t even speaking out loud.

Conrad chose picketing to be in communication with the public sphere, rather than only with Young. He stood by his proclamations and found the appropriate means of circulating them during a period when, we can assume, several letters by lawyers may have changed hands. Around this time, Young attempted to get Conrad and Cale to sign contracts admitting that they were merely performers in what Young claimed were his (and only his) compositions for the Theatre of Eternal Music. By standing in the street, Conrad publicly articulated these protests as part of the history of this music. His mode of engaging and reinserting himself into the history of “early minimalism” (a phrase which he frequently noted was intended to be ridiculous) was by asserting a continuity between his formal actions, the sounds on Young’s tapes (still inaudible to most listeners, since Young refuses to release them), and the public memory and context for any of the sounds that might eventually become available—which happened ten years later with the Table of the Elements release of Day of Niagara. In this public articulation of his argument—a means of taking to the streets as a solitary, weird protester to make history—Tony was building off his work from around the same time in his public access project “Studio of the Streets.” This is yet another project which is likely to receive little attention in the near future, as it breaks with not only economies of art, but also modes of historicizing art. (For some interviews, photos, and writing around the project, see Doing the City, a program published by the 80WSE Gallery in New York.)

Listening to the crowd from his window, placing it in opposition to its filtered presentation for mass mediation, draws to attention the dissonance between history as it actually occurs and history as it is mediated for us through the memorialization of experts and specialists.

Perhaps my favorite historical record, though, in Tony Conrad’s long career, is from another Table of the Elements CD, The Bryant Park Moratorium (1969), that went entirely unnoticed among all of the roundups of his “best moments” in the news these last weeks. In 1969, Tony Conrad lived just off Bryant Park in New York City during the famous “Bryant Park Moratorium” aimed at demanding an end to the Vietnam War. While the protest is remembered today for the involvement of and speeches from prominent celebrities and politicians—Woody Allen, Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul and Mary), forgotten Broadway stars (“please sit down so people can see them” the producer introducing them yells), Dick Cavett, and so on—Conrad provides an entirely different mode of listening to the event. In place of the representatives, delegates, and stars that so frequently stand in both for regular people and for the importance of an event, Conrad takes a unique approach to presenting the tension at hand in media coverage of such democratic mobilizations. Conrad sat in his apartment with one microphone and tape machine pointed out his window at the crowds below, and another mic’ing his television set’s news coverage. In the Table of the Elements release from 2005, the two tracks are panned left and right, showing the stark tension between the noise of the crowd and the clear, singular speech of the television set, focused on representative individuals deemed able to speak for the crowd. What’s remarkable on the CD is how rarely the sound of the speakers at the podium are audible above the roar of the crowd. Amid the celebrities constantly interpellated from the crowd by the reporters, and the politicians speaking to the crowd through loudspeakers, one might expect to frequently hear the same sounds booming across the park and up to Conrad’s window. Instead, we hear rhythmic applause, percussion, shouting, street noise, always in stark contrast to the bland platitudes of politicians and actors. Only rarely does any event in the media coverage rise to the level of street-level attention.

While Conrad was only 28 at the time, the method of recording the moratorium clearly set a standard for his approach to many issues of history and representation throughout his career. Listening to the crowd from his window, placing it in opposition to its filtered presentation for mass mediation, draws to attention the dissonance between history as it actually occurs and history as it is mediated for us through the memorialization of experts and specialists. His entire approach as a historian, artist, and all-around trickster, seems to be: How do I supplement the count of people assumed responsible for this public action? For the sound of minimalism in the early 1960s? How do I remind popular memory that an event was messy, collaborative, collective, and noisy? Is there something that occurs comparable to a difference tone that can result from listening to a heterogeneous collision in the realms of history and politics?

Tony Conrad’s writing is an incredible model of thought for any composer or musicologist. Studying his work as a historian means not only dealing with facts and details about the life and works of an important musician; it means engaging in a dialog with a thoughtful writer and thinker himself, someone whose thought and writing provokes reflexivity in my own writing studies. As several people noted in a fascinating piece on NPR that drew on the comments of several important collaborators, Tony could not help but be a teacher—including of generous and critical music-historical practice.

Remembering Steven Stucky (1949-2016)

Posted on February 19, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

Steven Stucky

Steven Stucky

A note from Ed Harsh, President and CEO of New Music USA:

A special sadness spread quickly over the new music community earlier this week as word of Steve Stucky’s death spread. There has already been much written and there will be much more to come. Steve’s rare combination of qualities, beginning with his musical genius but extending far beyond, touched so many people. Wisdom, humor, erudition, humility. He brought these and so many more to all that he did.

Following our custom on NewMusicBox, we asked a close colleague of Steve’s to write a memorial essay. Christopher Rouse succinctly sums up what an extraordinary friend and role model Steve has been to so many of us. We encourage you all to add your own thoughts and remembrances in the comments section below.

For New Music USA as an institution, it would be hard to overstate Steve’s impact. He served brilliantly as our Vice Chair, bringing clarity and perspective accompanied always by support and inspiration. Perhaps most fundamentally, he was one of the truly indispensable colleagues who turned two organizations, the American Music Center and Meet The Composer, into one. New Music USA wouldn’t be New Music USA without him. He’ll always hold a very special place in our hearts.

*

In 1973, when I first enrolled in the master’s program at Cornell University, my fellow composers spoke often about Steven Stucky, who had begun his graduate work there the year before but who was then serving two years in Iceland as a member of the US Air Force. There was universal admiration for him both as a composer and a person. Hearing a piece of his – the Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano – told me that he was indeed a composer of special gifts. Already evident were the fastidiousness and elegance that would come to characterize his mature work. When he returned to Cornell, Steve and I became fast friends, jawing about virtually every conceivable subject and sometimes playing extended frisbee or softball games on the Quad.

That close friendship continued until February 14 of this year, when he suddenly passed away after a three-month battle with brain cancer. Those of us close to him knew of his struggle but expected – hoped? – Steve would be with us longer. I had last spoken to him about a week earlier, when his spirits seemed high and his fighting spirit strong. The one consolation was that he died peacefully in his sleep.

His achievements as composer and writer have been extensively chronicled elsewhere, as have the achievements of the many Stucky students who have gone on to remarkable careers in their own right. The greatest testament to him is the extraordinary outpouring of grief on the Internet upon his death. So many had deep feelings for him. He had an astounding intellect, but perhaps more important were his warmth, graciousness, and generosity of spirit. He gave unstintingly of his time to many organizations; perhaps even more important, he did the same for his friends and his students. Every young composer who had the opportunity to work with Steve carried away memories that would last a lifetime, not only in terms of the valuable instruction they received but also through the example he set as a humble and caring human being.

He was the most centered friend I have ever had. Even in the most difficult times of his life he maintained his usual friendly and calm demeanor. I don’t recall ever seeing him show anger or stress. Though his heart might be breaking, there was never self-pity nor any demonstration of emotional excess in his behavior. His family meant the world to him, and his marriage to Kristen Frey Stucky brought him enormous joy and peace over the last several years of his life, as did his ongoing close relationship with his two children, Maura and Matthew.

I don’t think I’m alone in seeing Steve as the sort of person we all wish we were. Even had he lacked the musical genius he did in fact possess, his way of living his life and treating all with kindness and respect would have been a model worth emulating for anyone. Loved by so many, we have lost not only a great composer, but the dearest of friends. I wonder how we will be able to go on without him.

John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, and Steven Stucky

John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, and Steven Stucky at the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letter Ceremonial

A Letter to Leslie Bassett (1923-2016)

Posted on February 19, 2016 by - Headlines, Memorials

Anita and Leslie Bassett with Gabriela Lena Frank and Paul Yeon Lee

Anita and Leslie Bassett with Gabriela Lena Frank and Paul Yeon Lee in February 2012.

My dearest mentor, my teacher, my role model, my Leslie:

I miss you like crazy. It’s been a few years since we last talked, a total insanity considering how often in my daily life, I still hear your words of counsel from our music lessons of old. I can see the way your hands used to hold your knees when you laughed while seated, head back and eyes closing in mirth at some bit of mischief I would jaw off, nervous and eager to amuse. I remember your distinctive walk, frail and steely both, across worn carpet to the treble-bright piano in your studio, thick music score in hand. When I was over early at the house, you and beautiful Anita would fry up corn pancakes while discussing a marvelous new clarinetist who bled “for his composer and played like it was his last breath!” These days, when I hear the clarinet, I swear, in a fit of quasi-synesthesia, that I’m tasting corn…

The love that a student has for her teacher is a special one. I was not a child when, in the ’90s, you stepped out of retirement for a brief stint to become a mentor for a few lucky students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In fact, I was already experienced and cognizant of the usefulness of having someone to idealize and be guided by, especially a composer so widely revered and respected. I even expected it. What I hadn’t expected was to be consistently wowed—humbled really—by your humanity. Honestly, I can’t imagine the wellspring of personal experience and patience you reached into when assessing the counterpoint and orchestration of my well-meaning but so very naïve scores, those earliest attempts to tease out a voice as a Peruvian-American with Chinese and Lithuanian Jewish forbearers, as a woman with hippy-feminist roots, and even as a disabled individual. Although you were from a certain era of “old school” American men that might not have been surrounded by the most diverse peers, you easily talked with me about the most volatile of subjects affecting me deeply as a young composer: Racism and “playing the race card,” cultural tributes vs. cultural parasitism, ambition in one’s career and ambition in one’s personal artistry, sexism, and the distracting, god-awful noisy politicization of it all. I was well aware of taking up the time of a man who had been a young soldier in one of the world’s ugliest wars, who later experienced what no parent ever should in losing a young child, and whose own face was startlingly altered after fighting serious illness. You still believed in teaching and writing great music, and that made me even more devoted.

Knowing well how your eyes shone to work with performers who played from the gut, leaving it all out on the stage, I remember putting my fingers to work in the only meaningful gesture I could think of to properly thank you when I left school: recording your complete piano and piano/violin works on a CD. It was a Frank family affair with my sweet mom, the stained glass artist, designing a cover to your specs and with my father, the Mark Twain scholar, editing the booklet texts. (I couldn’t figure out a role for my scientist brother.) In the recording sessions, I threw myself into the heady mix of tonality and atonality that was your hallmark, wrestling with the terse lines that needed to suddenly sprawl, or pulling symphonic colors out of the Steinway borrowed from the Detroit Symphony. Definitely, for a brief time, I caught the bug that unjaded new music performers have: Wanting an esteemed composer’s approval so bad, it’s like needing benediction from the pope.

You taught even when you didn’t mean to. Introducing me to the joys of Wallace and Gromit? Priceless. Gamely working a tough piece of jerky I offered when I forgot that chewing was difficult, an embarrassing faux pas? Likewise priceless. Playing hopeful yet gentlemanly matchmaker between me and a platonic male composer friend, declaring others to be “boobs?” So, so, so very priceless.

If I had stayed in better touch these past few years, I would have been able to tell you that said platonic male composer friend and I are still dear to one another while both happily married to others. I would be able to tell you that my career landed fine, and I think it will continue on all right. I would tell you that I absolutely did kick to the curb my illness and its ensuing “wellness” regime of surgeries and radiation. I would tell you about playing your Preludes piano suite in a men’s prison and them loving its craggy unyielding modernity; that, as you advised, I have a tough skin against bad/ignorant reviews but a necessary skeptical eye towards the good; and that I’ve bought land to raise Peruvian alpacas not far from where you grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, son of a pig farmer. I would tell you that having lived into my middle years now, I appreciate better how steadfastly you held onto your values as artist, teacher, colleague, father, and husband: Simply put, a man of integrity and honor. Most of all, I would tell you that I it pains me that performances of your beautiful music had slowed in recent times—an injustice—but that I would, nudged once again into action by your leaving us, do what I could to remind the world of your musical legacy.

You knew me as an atheist, more by circumstance than intentional design, but I confess that there is the rare occasion that someone gives me pause. I feel their incandescence, and I’m at a loss to explain their excellence in ordinary terms.

Rest in peace, my teacher, Leslie dear. I will always be missing you tons.

Yours,

Gabriela

Gabriela Lena Frank, Leslie Bassett, and Paul Yeon Lee

Gabriela Lena Frank, Leslie Bassett, and Paul Yeon Lee.