Tag: composer memorial

Intense, Hardworking and Fun Loving—Remembering Stephen Paulus (1949-2014)

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - Headlines, Memorials

Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus at the American Composers Forum's 35th Anniversary celebration (immediately after their joint keynote address).

Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus at the American Composers Forum’s 35th Anniversary celebration (immediately after their joint keynote address) in 2008. Photo courtesy Craig Carnahan, American Composers Forum.

Who could imagine what would come from two student composers talking about life while walking between classes? I am certain that neither Steve Paulus (I’ve never been able to call him Stephen) nor I could. We were just kids then. Midwestern kids. Midwestern kids who shared a passion to compose music and a pretty fierce belief that we composers had a right to authentic voice.

During those walks between Russian history class, across the Washington Avenue Bridge at the University of Minnesota (often in sub-zero temperatures), on our way to the music building, Steve and I would take on world topics in composition. Those were intense conversations. What did we think about this or that new piece? What is the value of a closed pitch system in a world of infinite sound? What is the life of a composer if not employed as a faculty member? Is there an audience for new, abstract compositions? Where could we learn how to do business as independent, professional composers? What would life be like? Intense questions. And we came up with an intense answer: if there wasn’t a professional life waiting for us to join it, we would build one for all of us.

I listened to my friend, and got to know Steve as a guy with a big brain, an admirable work ethic, a sense of fairness, a generous spirit, and best of all he was funny. I liked him. We all liked him.

The first 12 years of building the Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum) was a vortex of creative energy. There were mountains of work to be accomplished. It was a joy to work with Steve. He was fearless about contacting people for meetings. We had our act down when we made a meeting. Before opening the meeting door, Steve would quip “Ars longa, meetings brevis,” and we would enter laughing. Steve would lead off the conversation. Then he’d pass it to me and I would talk about the essential place of the composer in the world. Then back to Steve, who would elaborate and throw in a joke or two, always funny, always on point.

The staff of the Minnesota Composers Forum in 1977. Photo courtesy Craig Carnahan, American Composers Forum.

The staff of the Minnesota Composers Forum in 1977 (from left to right: Randall Davidson, Stephen Paulus, Monte Mason, and Libby Larsen). Photo courtesy Craig Carnahan, American Composers Forum.

Steve was tremendously disciplined. He composed every day, whether he wanted to or not. He completed everything he started. He made lists and checked off each task when it was done. He helped a person when they needed help. You could always count on him for conviviality. You could count on him for advice. He gave me the best financial advice of my professional life when he said “Just envision the amount of money you will need next year, believe it, and it will be there.” He was right.
Steve was intense, hardworking and fun loving. But he was at his absolute best when he met Patty “Tutz” Stuzman. He had found the love of his life and his energy lined up with the stars. The two of them together were a wonderful couple.

But the thing I admire most about Steve is Stephen Paulus, the composer. All the traits that made Steve Steve are present in his music. His music is layered in meaning. It invites you to return to it and when you do, there is always something deeper, richer, delightful to discover. I admire his ability to compose a beautifully constructed lyric line. It’s maddeningly difficult to create a highly original and memorable lyric line. At this, Stephen is one of the best. His musical signatures—quick rhythmic bursts, elegant uses of minimal percussion, a well placed chord which resolves in an unexpected and highly emotional way and, of course, his masterful ways with text setting—make his music his, and his alone. In his music, Stephen met his goal—to be authentic. His music lasts, and will last for many years to come.

Over the last 30 years, Steve continued to live his credo, composing as a profession and contributing to the profession as a musical citizen. His work with the ASCAP board of directors was a part of his life I know he valued greatly. As a visiting composer at numerous colleges and universities he was an important model for young composers who aspired to live their lives composing music. Stories about Steve abound and I hear many of them in my own peregrinations.

My friend, colleague, collaborator and professional partner, Stephen Paulus has passed away. I was standing in line in Zone 5, waiting to board a plane when Joel Revzen, a mutual friend of ours, called with the news. For those of us who were near Steve during the fifteen months following his stroke, the news was expected, but still very hard to bear. But the heart is made lighter by the sixty-five years Steve was with us.

Stephen Paulus at the piano during a rehearsal for his ChoralQuest piece.

Stephen Paulus at the piano during a rehearsal for his ChoralQuest piece Through All Things in March 2011. Photo courtesy Craig Carnahan, American Composers Forum.

Richard Toensing (1940-2014)—“The Oak Doesn’t Grow as Fast as the Squash”

Posted on August 5, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

Richard Toensing

Richard Toensing, photo courtesy Bella Voce Communications

Richard Toensing (March 11, 1940 – July 2, 2014) started teaching composition at age 26 at Upsala College, and at age 33 began a storied career on faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). He continued teaching privately a bit after he retired from CU in 2005, and he passed away last month at age 74. After over forty years of teaching, Dick was well known as a pedagogue for his integrity, his delightful wit, and his zero-tolerance policy for what he called “that bull-hooey ego nonsense that gets in the way of hard work and real life.”

Composer Greg Simon, a former student of Dick’s currently completing his DMA at the University of Michigan, wrote a beautiful memorial blog post in which he wrote:

No one would ever accuse Dick of coddling his students. True to his upbringing, he demanded work, dedication, and a bit of a thick skin. If you came to a lesson without the work done, he sent you away to do it. He was quick to tell you if he disliked something, and slow to spell out the solution – he believed you should find it. But Dick loved his students, and he cared for them. He would lend students hours of extra time to help them make decisions about music or life.

Dick was also a wonderful composer. The writer of an obituary published in the Boulder Daily Camera the day after he died remarked: “Reviewers of Toensing’s works, sacred and otherwise, have said that the listener is struck by a transparency of sound, a simplicity that exists inside complexity, and a sparkling clarity of parts.” After being raised a Lutheran in Minnesota, in the ’90s Dick converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. If you’ve not yet heard his music, a great window in would be to start with his Responsoria, his Flute Concerto, and/or his Kontakion on the Nativity of Christ.

Mere weeks before he passed away, Dick wrote an e-mail to a group of former students, telling us of his terminal cancer and how proud he was to have been able to teach us. Since his death last month, I’ve re-read the full contents of my “RT” e-mail folder. We began e-mailing in the fall of 1998, after my three years of master’s degree study with Dick ended and I had moved to Ann Arbor for the downbeat of my DMA at U-M. RT’s folder spans 16 years of correspondence, and I share his words in excerpts from his e-mails (I’m sure he wouldn’t mind), to best illuminate how he was as a teacher.

As in his music, Dick embraced the challenges of teaching with his simplicity inside complexity. He had an indelible ability to be engaging, stringent, rigorous, and nurturing all at once.

Congrats on your entrance exams – that’s no mean feat, and you should be proud of what you did. But don’t overload yourself – save plenty of time to think and to write. Just remember that the first two bars always have to be something folks would go across the street twice to hear! I’m sure that once you find your sea-legs you’ll do splendidly.

Dick taught like he wrote music, with a stunning patience. Lessons were calm, slow. He looked only at the score and never touched the piano. With his patience and diligence he heard every note he saw.

Glad to hear that things are going well with you and Albright – but again, remember; take your time, the oak doesn’t grow as fast as the squash.
I’ve learned the absolute necessity of taking time thru the composing of Orthodox liturgical music – since everything one writes in that genre is intended to be sung forever (well, at least for a millennium or so) the music has to absolutely sound well and wear like iron – a far cry from the Western idea of “write it, perform it, and if it’s no good, throw it away.” I just revised the second half of my Cherubic Hymn this a.m., and now am letting it sit and cook for at least a year (with numerous revisitings, tinkerings, tweakings, etc. along the way.)

Dick had a staggeringly dry wit. He often imparted compositional wisdom via exaggerated impersonations of his own U-M mentors Ross Lee Finney and Leslie Bassett, and/or his tried-and-true Minnesotan Ole & Lena jokes. In re-reading his e-mails I was reminded, too, of how often he’d dapple in delicious nuggets like so:

Did you read that Frankie Yankovic died? He, along with Whoopee John, was the King of the Polka Bands. If you can find a Yankovic record, get it – it’s SO bad that it’s actually good – the ultimate low-brow high camp – and makes Lauren Swelk* look like the Hollywood cheese that he really was.

(* A pun or a dig or a ridiculous misspelling was RT’s way.)
In his diligence and dedication to his art, Dick believed all one needs is faith in one’s process and faith in one’s self – simply stay at it, it’ll come. He signed off most emails with a variance of “just keep writing beautiful notes, and you’ll be just fine – RT” or, my favorite, “write thousands of good notes – RT.”

Sounds like you’ve got a full plate, all right. Well, welcome to graduate skule, Michigan-style. Not only will you survive, you’ll thrive, if I know you. A propos of your pno. piece – just keep slugging away, and remember to compose every day, even if only for a little while.

Expect that your first effort there, in a new and demanding environment, will be like your first effort here (remember how long it took to do that little piece for clarinet, vibe, and bass, and how dissatisfied you were by the end of the year when you heard it?). But that was an important first step – what you are writing now is likewise. So keep your powder dry and keep on firing.

One thing you might try to maintain is continuity: at the end of each composing session write out in longhand for yourself exactly where you are in the piece, what you need to do next, what problems you need to solve, etc., etc. Then when you next get back to your work, read what you had written – it’ll help focus your mind. Another trick that I often use when I get stuck is to “unravel” a bit of the piece – i.e. to take a clean piece of paper and simply re-write the last phrase or so as a way to get the wheels rolling; usually you can move forward then.

Dick spoke of feeling musically rejuvenated when he converted to the Orthodox Church. This faith and its community seemed perfectly suited to his mind and musical aesthetic. He didn’t over-speak about how his church informed his life; yet it was clear his was a deep, poignant faith with which he engaged passionately.

The Orthodox are strict about what they will allow to be sung in the Liturgy – it has to be “orthodox music” (which is one of those things that no-one can quite define, but, as Fr. S. says, “I know it when I hear it.” Quite different from my good ol’ lax Lutheran days, when anything I wrote “went.” But in Orthodoxy one is writing music that the church will use potentially from now unto ages of ages, amen, so one has to take time and really do it right. It’s a good spiritual discipline – keeps one humble.)

Dick really knew repertoire. He believed in and demanded exacting, hard-core score study. He also loved to lunch and rep-talk. He adored melody; his own music is plushly drenched in it. At the same time, Dick was also all about harmony, harmony, harmony, in every sense of the word.

I finally got this new piece off the ground (barely) this a.m. – I’ve decided to do it the old-fashioned way – lots of hard work, hand-crafting each spectacular sound (and all that jazz).

About the (two pieces) you sent: I was very impressed and pleased by the increasing sophistication of texture and gesture in both pieces – they mark a huge step forward for you in that regard (remember the piece for clarinet, vibraphone, and double bass only a few years ago?); I’ll be eager to hear where you go next, and most interested to see where it all ends up. The only thing that gave me pause a little was what I heard as a kind of static harmonic rhythm which seems at odds with the sophistication in other areas. I’m certainly no foe of slow harmonic rhythm (as you know), but I had the sense that harmonic movement was something which wasn’t a principal concern in either piece. As you continue, you may want to try working out a tentative harmonic rhythm plan beforehand, so that the piece has a harmonic shape which is totally under your control; I’ve found that harmonic movement (or the lack of it) is such a powerful expressive tool; I think you will too.

Re-reading his e-mails has been like patching together a massive memories-montage of my formative years in Dick’s studio, even before we wrote to one another. He is responsible for my love of Stravinsky’s music. When he heard I was to play Piano IV in Les Noces at CU, Dick said, “Goodness. Well. Excellent! We must take time in your lessons this term to analyze that one to death.” He frequently pointed to Stravinsky’s scores as good go-to’s for help, particularly with proportioning contrasting sections and economy of musical materials.

I was surprised (and pleased) to find you writing in as diatonic an idiom as you did; somehow I had expected something more chromatic. A couple of points to ponder: 1. Do you need the winds? In the main, they didn’t seem to be doing that much that was significant. 2. You need to have some larger sections of the work that are simpler, more melodic, and more transparently scored to balance the sections that are more dense – it seems to me that your writing is generated more harmonically than melodically, and you may want to re-consider that for future works. But these are small cavils in what is a huge achievement – buy yourself some roses!

Dick’s manner was like a perfectly constructed song about being comfortable in one’s skin. He wrote a large collection of solo and choral vocal music; it all sings exquisitely. He talked about “screaming quietly,” or “loudly whispering” – which is how he taught. As in his music, Dick taught steadily, steadfastly, unwavering, with kindness and precision. He believed that our lives sing. That our music is not simply a 19th-century romantic notion in which the notes are “tied to life”; rather, our music is life, and that tones are “simply beautiful in themselves.”

Finney once said to me, “You don’t like melody much, do you?” (Obviously that’s not true now.) In the piece you sent most recently, melodies, when they occur, are some of the most fetching and expressive parts of the music – make more of them! They’re what connect with a general audience, and show that you have a heart, as well as technique.

As the years drew on, our correspondence became less about the nuts and bolts of composing, and more about our general lives. Dick shared updates about his kids and his cats, he spoke of his beloved wife Carol’s goings-on, his students, etc. His obituary states his fondness for gardening, “with a special weakness for irises.” From the last e-mail I received before his death, which was so sweetly him:

To contemplate the end of one’s life is quite an experience! But I’m thankful, at least, that I have both the time and (still) the mental capacity to actually do that contemplation, and my Orthodox faith makes it both a time of sadness for what will soon be lost, and joy, for what will soon be gained. I look forward to the future (for myself) with hope and confidence, though I will miss Carol more than I can possibly ever say. But some day even that pain will be erased. So – we go forward.

Dick Toensing gave us some of the most gorgeous music on this earth. Equally important, the distinguishedness of the sheer volume of wisdom he imparted to his students is immeasurable. He was an ever-optimist, an ever-realist, and never a downer. Yes, he could see through the bull-hooey quicker than most and didn’t hesitate to politely call it out. His career was like the slow-growing oak, and as an artist, teacher, and human he expressed himself clearly, gently, with respect and compassion. Then, for example, when a former student sent a quick note from NYC saying she had a job offer from his shared alma mater, his words sang:

WUNNERFUL! WUNNERFUL! HIGH CONGRATULATIONS – THAT’S ABSOLUTELY GREAT! BRAVO FOR YOU! (I assume you’ll take it….) It’s 10:20 in the evening out there, or I’d call you and gush all over the place, but I will save that for another day and time. I can’t tell you how proud of you I am, and how pleased for you. I know that you’ll make the most of it.
One word of advice: don’t bring out that little piece for vibraphone, etc.

As always, for the loving advice Dick, thank you.

Charlie Haden (1937-2014)—One of the Greatest

Posted on July 22, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

[Ed. Note: It was extremely shocking to receive an email with the sad news of Charlie Haden’s passing from Tina Pelikan at ECM late in the afternoon on Friday, July 11, 2014. As per our tradition at NewMusicBox, rather than rushing in with breaking news that soon became widely available elsewhere, we waited and then asked someone close to reflect on the life and music of the artist we had lost. Carla Bley seemed the natural choice. Haden had been making headlines as a sideman since the late 1950s, first with Paul Bley, Art Pepper, and Hampton Hawes, and then most notably as the bassist in the Ornette Coleman Quartet. (He ultimately appeared on 15 of Coleman’s albums.) But Haden did not emerge as a leader until his Liberation Music Orchestra made its debut in 1969, releasing a genre-defying album that merged politically charged anthems with a free jazz sensibility. Aside from Haden’s own firm bass playing, which grounded the adventurous music of leaders he had worked with over the course of the previous decade, what held the music of the Liberation Music Orchestra together and made it all work were the arrangements by Carla Bley, who was also the group’s pianist. Bley served as the arranger as well as conductor for the LMO’s subsequent recordings in 1982, 1990, and 2005. As Bley relates, they were actually working on a new recording before Haden became ill; her brief but poignant words are a testimony to a musical creator who transcended language and style.—FJO]

It is perhaps fitting that on both the first album released by the Liberation Music Orchestra

It is perhaps fitting that on both the first album released by the Liberation Music Orchestra, the eponymous 1969 Impulse LP, and their final recording, Not In Our Name, released in 2005, that Charlie Haden and Carla Bley are pictured on opposite sides, holding up the LMO banner.

Death sucks, not for the person who dies—it’s mostly a rational solution—but for the people who live on with the absence of a favorite living, breathing creature. That moment that separates life and death is unsettling to contemplate. The day after Charlie died, I read a piece in the July 13 New York Times Op-Ed section called “The Afterlife” by Ted Gup. There was a beautifully written paragraph that I was moved to send to Charlie’s wife, Ruth. I knew what she had been through during the last few years as his health got worse and worse, and what she must be experiencing now. Gup wrote about “how death plays out over time—not the biological episode that collapses it all into a nanosecond of being and not being, but the slower arc of our leaving, the long goodbye—sorting through the mail, paying the bills, stumbling upon notes. It is like the decommissioning of a great battleship. There is the official notice and ceremony, and then the long and agonizing process that follows—the disposition of so much tonnage. Eulogies are never the last word.”

There is a creepy scrawled note on my desk with “call Charlie” crossed off.

For the past few years, we had been talking about making another Liberation Music Orchestra album. This one would be about the environment, an issue that Charlie was deeply into. I had already finished three arrangements and we had played them at a couple of festival concerts in Europe during the summer of 2012. Manfred Eicher was interested in producing the album for ECM. The plot was to record it during the orchestra’s next European tour, but Charlie’s health had him so grounded that the next tour never happened. I had to stop working on the project because I had other commitments. We got to play the new pieces once more at a festival in California that celebrated the entire Haden family. That miraculously joyful occasion, during June of 2013, was the last time we saw each other, but we kept in touch by telephone until two days before he passed away.

On Saturday I turned on the radio and heard Charlie’s voice. He was talking to Terry Gross during the replaying of a Fresh Air interview from the ‘80s. The conversation was almost embarrassingly about things that had nothing to do with his importance as one of the greatest and certainly most recognizable jazz bass players that ever lived.

Charlie Haden and Carla Bley

Charlie Haden and Carla Bley. Photo by Roberto Masotti, courtesy ECM.

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

Posted on July 14, 2014 by - Headlines, Memorials

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

Seymour Barab playing the cello

A young Seymour Barab playing the cello

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

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

Barab smoking

It was another era.

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

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

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

Barab playing cello with ben Weber standing in back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Mary Rodgers (1931-2014): A Woman of Many Talents

Posted on July 8, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

2008 Photo of Mary Rodgers

Mary Rodgers Guettel in 2008. Photo by Leo Sorel, courtesy of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

Mary Rodgers, who was for many years my Rodgers boss at the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, died on June 26. She was a woman of many talents, but for the purposes of NewMusicBox, let’s talk about Mary Rodgers, the composer.
Writing music tends to get listed after a lot of the other things she did in her life: daughter of a legendary composer father and fiercely competent mother; mother of five successful children (one of whom is a composer in his own right); wife to two distinctive husbands; writer of children’s books (including one of the best known titles of all time – Freaky Friday), board member (of many schools and institutions, including Juilliard, for which she served as chairman); family representative (for many years the Rodgers voice in the world of Rodgers & Hammerstein & Hart); philanthropist (generous donor to many causes); lecturer (from clubs to cruise ships); friend to many (perhaps most notably Stephen Sondheim, but also Leonard Bernstein and Hal Prince etc.). The list goes on and on.

But she was a composer. Imagine, if you will, what it must have taken, to decide to go into the family business when your father had lived through one wildly successful collaboration (with Lorenz Hart), and had created another even more successful partnership which had effectively turned American musical theater on its ear and into an art form (with Oscar Hammerstein II). Just to go to a piano in a house out of which flowed all that glorious—and wildly popular—music must have taken a combination of guts, confidence, and pride. Not to mention talent.

But to the piano she went. After having toiled in the fields of Golden Books, television, and commercials (my wife can still sing you Mary’s Prince Spaghetti TV jingle), her first breakthrough work was Once Upon a Mattress. She often told the story of playing one of the songs for her father, who questioned why she had written one of the passages the way she had. At that moment, she said, she realized he was asking because she was doing something different from what he would have done. She realized she had to be careful playing music for him; she had to keep doing things her own way. Gutsy.

Mary Rodgers in the 1950s

Mary Rodgers in the 1950s. Photo courtesy the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

I recently listened to the London cast album of Once Upon a Mattress in a car, by myself, from beginning to end, uninterrupted. Several things struck me. First, it has all the melody that the Broadway musical theater of 1959 demanded. Hummable tunes, perhaps, although I am not exactly sure what that phrase means. But second, it has harmonies that are surprising, and indicate the unique voice of the composer. Listen to “Yesterday I Loved You” and you’ll see what I mean. One harmonic bed is established in the verse, and yet when the lyrics shifts to the present—“…and today, I love you even more”—the harmony and rhythm change and surprise us. We are taken somewhere new. That’s quintessential Mary. (The third thing that struck me is that Marshall Barer’s lyrics are genius – too bad his talent never found as appropriate a piece again.) And then there is “Sensitivity”—a song entirely in 5/4 time. Of course the word “sensitivity” has five syllables, so it makes sense, but the music feels almost insensitive as it keeps shifting between a feel of two beats and three. The rhythm is set up so the emphasis is on the third syllable (e.g. “SensiTIVity, sensiTIVity”) and then it gets tweaked on the next line: “I’m just loaded with THAT” with the last word falling in a beautifully awkward place. It is perfect for the jabbering Queen who won’t shut up.

The next Mary Rodgers score I fell in love with was The Mad Show. I loved the roundness of “I’m Looking for Someone”; it has a melody that never stops flowing from one thought to the next as the character gets completely and totally internally lost. Even the two chords she uses for the Bob Dylan parody “Well It Ain’t” stand back and let the lyric take center stage: “You think it’s easy, singing about misery and how the world is up a creek – when you’re making over four thousand dollars a week!” The music is entirely appropriate to the task at hand.

Of course The Mad Show contains what has become her most well known song, one she wrote with her old friend Stephen Sondheim. The story—and again, it is a very Mary story—was that when she and Marshall Barer played their score for Bill Gaines, the publishing guru of MAD magazine, he rejected all of the songs, saying they had nothing to do with his magazine. (He later relented.) While Marshall melted down and disappeared, Mary got on the phone and called her friends to come and help. So she and Steve Sondheim wrote a gay parody of “The Girl from Ipanema,”a popular song of the day, with a series of unpronounceable names of places where “the boy” was from and would go. (Because Sondheim was helping his pal and didn’t want to continue being known primarily as a lyricist, he first called himself “Nom de Plume” and then “Esteban Rio Nido.”) Writing a gay song was a bit of a risk at the time; years later Sondheim said he wasn’t sure such an overtly (if brilliantly subtle) gay song would be acceptable. It was, and has become a staple of the cabaret world. There is even a clip of Peggy Lee singing it!

By the time I worked with Mary, and then for her when she succeeded her mother as the Rodgers representative at Rodgers & Hammerstein, she had pretty much pushed Mary the composer to the back burner. Two experiences probably helped do that: the Broadway failure of Hot Spot, a musical written for Judy Holliday which crashed and burned at the Majestic Theater, and a musical version of The Member of the Wedding which was a heartbreak. She was never granted the rights to the Carson McCullers novel, although she and Marshall Barer had completed their score, were proud of it, and had reason to believe the rights would be forthcoming. But they weren’t; somebody had lied to them, and later the rights were given to someone else, and a forgettable musical titled F. Jasmine Adams opened and closed quickly at the downtown Circle in the Square. Mary mentioned this from time to time—it hurt, and effectively put an end to her collaboration with Marshall.

But there were several of us who didn’t think the composer should retire completely. One of those was Jay Harnick, creator of Theatreworks USA. His company wrote original works for student audiences, and he hired the best of the musical theater writers, directors and performers to create shows for them. He wanted to do an adaptation of Mary’s Freaky Friday, and convinced Mary to write the score herself. She agreed, and worked with lyricist John Forster. One of their songs from the show—“At the Same Time”—was as good a song as she ever wrote. The premise: can you love somebody and hate somebody at the same time? Forster’s lyrics were Lorenz Hart-like in their wit, and the tune that Mary provided was sweet, interesting, and completely satisfying. (Years later Forster adapted the lyrics for the revue of Mary’s music titled Hey, Love.)

The Theatreworks USA Freaky Friday was a good experience. So good, in fact, that when the persuasive Lyn Austin convinced Mary to try one more time, she agreed, although a bit reluctantly. The work was an adaptation of Frank Stockton’s The Griffin and the Minor Canon, and Lyn wanted to perform it first up at the then Stockbridge home of her Music Theater Group. The creative team ended up being an unhappy one, and I think Mary regretted ever having gotten involved. Effectively, once that summer was over and the Berkshire production was finished, I don’t think she ever touched the piano again.
Another reason I think Mary moved away from composing was her admiration for her son Adam’s work. She saw in Adam the carrying on of the family tradition. She said that she felt like a gene conduit, and was happy to have passed on the family talent. She often characterized her own composing talent as “modest.” That would have been self-deprecating, had she not come from where she came from. She knew good and she knew O.K. In the world of musical theater, there are precious few Richard Rodgerses, Stephen Sondheims, and Adam Guettels. If she compared herself to them, as she did, and placed herself a notch below, I think we have to hand it to her. She was, after all, razor sharp about pretty much everything in life.

I knew Mary Rodgers for many, many years. She and her husband Hank Guettel were friends of my parents Betty and Schuyler Chapin. They socialized often, went on some holidays together, and conceived the best New Years’ parties ever—at the Guettels, where we rented a 16mm projector and watched a bunch of movies! (Yes, there was a time before instant gratification when movies weren’t actually available on your computers and iPhones. In fact, it wasn’t entirely legal to have 16mm prints of movies, but the Guettels had a friend…)

Ted Chapin and Mary Rodgers

Ted Chapin and Mary Rodgers in Shanghai in May 2004 attending an American production of The Sound of Music touring China. Photo by Broad way Asia, courtesy the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

It was Mary’s idea for me to run the Rodgers & Hammerstein office, and she loved that the job worked out so well. I sat next to her in many a theater, and I can attest to the fact that she had uncanny musical instincts. Yes, she knew and understood her father’s music well; in fact, she knew it instinctively. She knew when the tempo was right and when it wasn’t. She would say “it’s too fast” as often as “it’s too slow.”

One time I will never forget was the first preview at the Royal National Theater in London of the Trevor Nunn/Susan Stroman production of Oklahoma! Everything about the evening was spectacular, from the young unknown Australian in the lead (named Hugh Jackman) to the modern take on Agnes de Mille’s choreographic profile that Susan Stroman created. Late in the evening, when the title song came, after the company sang, “…and the wind comes right behind the rain!” Mary leaned over to me and said, “It’s a D sharp; they are singing a D natural.” Of course she was right, and the musical director received the note with graciousness and gratitude.

She also understood the art of arrangement, and was intolerant of sloppy harmonic deviations and wrong-minded rhythmic changes. The first time she heard one of David Chase’s dance arrangements for the new Flower Drum Song in a rehearsal room, I sat there wondering what her reaction would be. David had based the arrangement on a Rodgers song but had taken it a pretty far distance from its home base. I liked it a lot, but had no idea what Mary was feeling. As soon as the rehearsal was over, she got up, walked over and threw her arms around David.
She knew when it was good.

Lea Salonga, Mary Rodgers, Ted Chapin, Barbara Cook and Marin Mazzie at the Richard Rodgers Centennial Celebration concert on June 28, 2002 at the Gershwin Theatre. Photo By Bruce Glikas/ImageDirect, courtesy of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

Lea Salonga, Mary Rodgers, Ted Chapin, Barbara Cook and Marin Mazzie at the Richard Rodgers Centennial Celebration concert on June 28, 2002 at the Gershwin Theatre. Photo By Bruce Glikas/ImageDirect courtesy of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

Memories of Horace Silver (1928-2014)

Posted on June 30, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

[Ed. Note: Composer, pianist, and bandleader Horace Silver (1928-2014) had a career that spanned half a century. As the co-founder (with Art Blakey) of the Jazz Messengers, which would become a de-facto training ground for generations of musicians, he had a profound impact on the performance practice of jazz. As a composer and bandleader, he basically defined the sound world of hard bop in the 1950s and ’60s through his live performances and numerous recordings. Between 1953 and 1969, Blue Note released a total of 17 albums under Silver’s own name plus 23 albums featuring him as a sideman, making him one of the most widely recorded artists of that period. In Silver’s later career, he continued to evolve an idiosyncratic musical vocabulary that incorporated a wide range of musical genres. Between 1970 and his last recording session on December 18, 1998, an additional 20 albums were released under his name, most devoted exclusively to his own compositions. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1995. When we learned of his death on June 18, 2014, we thought the best way to honor his memory on NewMusicBox was to have someone who performed with him share memories of his music and life. There will be a memorial service at St. Augustine of Hippo Episcopal Church in New York City on July 7, 2014, at 7 p.m. More details are available on Horace Silver’s website.—FJO]

I learned a lot from Horace Silver.

1978 was a good year. I recorded my first album as a leader, had my 30th birthday, and joined the Horace Silver quintet. Having the birthday was easy, unlike the other two things.

I got the job with Horace by winning an invitation-only audition. It was a two-day, old-fashioned shootout where the last man standing got the job. That guy turned out to be me, although by then I was sort of crouching rather than standing.
Horace called me that night to tell me I was hired and to give me the upcoming itinerary. I had a drink, subbed out or cancelled the gigs I already had in the book, pissed off the required number of people, and hit the sack. Horace held two rehearsals and we hit the road.

Horace Silver at piano, John McNeil on trumpet

Horace Silver at the piano with John McNeil on trumpet in 1978. Photo courtesy John McNeil.

Horace wrote great tunes that have a way of improving you harmonically and rhythmically if you play them frequently (or every night, in my case). He also liked very fast tempos, and if you weren’t on top of it you’d get rolled right over.
It goes without saying, then, that I learned a lot harmonically and technically. Much of what I learned from Horace Silver, however, was not music in the technical sense. These things helped me to become a leader and turned out to be as important as improving my grasp of harmony and my execution. I thought I would share some of them with you here.

First of all, Horace believed in rehearsal. The band would never play anything in public that we hadn’t rehearsed and gotten completely ironed out. In addition, he didn’t allow you to read music on the bandstand—everything had to be memorized. He felt that reading looked unprofessional, like you weren’t prepared or the band was just thrown together.

Perhaps more importantly, Horace also felt that music stands put a barrier between the performer and the audience. Many older musicians agree with that, as do I. In situations where I have the authority, I always require the music to be memorized, and I have fired or not re-hired players who didn’t go along with it.

Horace’s book was pretty easy for us to memorize, because we either knew or had heard most of the tunes. The only real problem was when he introduced new tunes while we were on tour. We would rehearse in the afternoon at the club we were playing, and then we were expected to play the new stuff from memory that night.

If the tunes were straightforward enough, nobody had much of a problem. But Horace had started writing some quirky tunes that didn’t fall into any familiar pattern, and some would have chord changes that were essentially polychords written out like voicings. You really had to sweat to remember all the details of tunes like that.

For me, the worst one was this long composition with no solos in it. It was through-composed with some inner sections that repeated. I couldn’t keep it straight, so I asked Horace if I could take the music back to the hotel to study it and he consented. That night on the gig I put the music on the floor in front of me and studied it when I wasn’t actually playing. When we finally played the tune, I was shaky but made it through. After the set, a woman came up to me and said how remarkable it was to see someone concentrate so deeply, even between tunes. I think I said something like, “Yeah, well, it’s a gift, you know?”

Respect and musical etiquette were very important to Horace. For instance, he was a real stickler for being on time. He said right at the beginning, “I’ll never ask you cats to work one extra minute without getting paid for it. In return, when it’s time to start, you have to be onstage ready to play. Start on time, end on time, period. If you’re late, it’s twenty-five bucks.” This was still the 1970s, don’t forget; twenty-five bucks was significant.

The on-time rule also applied to getting back to the bandstand after a break. I ran afoul of this one time when I had been busy at the bar, chatting up a member of the opposite sex. All of a sudden I heard Horace play a little arpeggio and realized everyone was on the bandstand but me. I rushed up on stage and as I went by the piano, Horace, without looking up, said, “Twenty-five bucks. Good lookin’ though.”

The thing is, being on time wasn’t just some rigid rule of his. What really mattered to Horace was that being late and keeping other musicians waiting was disrespectful.

Another thing that was considered disrespectful—and still should be—was bringing your troubles to the bandstand. Whatever was going on in your life, whatever you were feeling or thinking, all of it had to stop at the edge of the stage. You bring your “A” game every time, at least in terms of effort. In Horace’s words, “Everybody else shouldn’t have to have a bad day just because you have one.”

Horace also had a lot of practical advice about things not directly related to music. For example, he said that if somebody asks for an advance, give them more than they ask for, because they’re probably asking for less than they need and then they’ll have to come back a second time. Or something like that. As a leader, I actually found that to be weird but true.

Since he was a human being, Horace Silver was not always wise in his dealings with others. He believed that if someone didn’t understand English, he could make them understand by simply speaking louder. He could be overly controlling, slow to pick up a check, quick to take offense—all the normal failings people have.

But in the things that really count, Horace was courageous and stood very tall when it was needed. He was a man of his word and always backed his musicians.

The following pretty much says it all.

Because it was still the 1970s, Horace took a lot of heat for hiring white musicians. Some in his black audiences didn’t dig the idea of any white person playing in a band led by a black man and playing black music, and they let Horace know about it.
We were playing Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, and during a break I was standing at the bar with Horace (he was probably having a coke, I never saw him drink alcohol) and I was asking him something about Charlie Parker. Odd how you remember stuff like that!

Anyway, we’re standing there talking and this large African-American dude walks up and pushes himself between Horace and me, facing Horace and giving me his back. I remember this like it was yesterday. He said, “Horace, man, why you usin’ these white boys to play your music?”

Horace looked up at the guy and said, “I use them because they can play. Now, you’re interrupting a conversation I’m having with my friend.”

The guy left. The subject was never mentioned.

Jim (J.K.) Randall (1929-2014)—Out of View of Anything Resembling the Mainstream

Posted on June 18, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

Mackey and Randall

Steven Mackey and J. K. Randall

[Ed. Note: Composer James Kirtland Randall is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking computer music compositions from the 1960s. (His 1965 Mudgett-Monologues by a Mass Murderer appeared on one of the earliest commercial LPs of computer music, released on Nonesuch in 1970.) But Randall created a much wider range of music. In his later years, he was particularly devoted to group improvisation. A member of the composition faculty at Princeton University from 1957 until his retirement in 1991, he influenced generations of composers. Shortly after learning of his death on May 28, 2014, we asked one of the composers he mentored, Steven Mackey, to share his memories.—FJO]

During my first week of teaching at Princeton in the fall of 1985, Jim Randall walked up to me and said, “Hey Steve, let’s improvise: you on the electric guitar and I’m thinkin’ that I’ll try the front end of the piano.” Any part of the piano—the back, the under carriage, the legs, inside, outside—it was all fair game to Jim, and he was never one to make assumptions. He knew guitar players that played with a knife and fork, but he knew that wasn’t me and he wanted me to be in my wheelhouse so he figured he would play notes on the keyboard.

Jim would put a 90-minute cassette—45 minutes a side—into the tape machine, hit record, and we would play non-stop until the cassette clicked off. Then we would immediately sit and listen to what we had recorded. We did this a few times leading into fall break that year, but during fall break we took it to another level. We met, three times a day for seven days straight—10 a.m., 3 p.m., and 7:30 p.m.

I have to admit that I had a need to impress Jim with the virtuosity of half-remembered licks from my childhood. I used them up by the end of the first day and by the end of the second day I was truly present. To aid in purging my prefabricated riffs, he set a teddy bear on the piano and told me that he would take musical suggestions from the teddy bear and pass them to me; then I took suggestions from the teddy bear and passed them to him. And then I gave the teddy suggestions to pass on to Jim. Eventually all possible permutations for communicating via the teddy bear were explored.
He was a great improviser. He could be stubborn as a colleague (one always got the feeling that if you disagreed with Jim, it was because you didn’t understand him), but as an improviser he was quite flexible. His rules for musical interaction were simple: don’t try to control the other, don’t be controlled by the other, but always listen carefully to the other. The goal was to contribute something to a whole that was bigger than the individual.

Our post-improv listening and conversation deflected my musical destiny permanently. There was the obvious effect of forcing me to explore the electric guitar in a new context. More profoundly, I noticed that the parts I liked the most violated all sorts of taboos that I had learned in graduate school. My favorite parts had various manifestations of awkwardness that I would have never “thought of” but that had real character, humanity, and curiosity.

Jim’s own music exemplified human oddity. It certainly did not aspire to impress or even express; it revealed. He was way out there. His Gap series of piano pieces are truly marvelous and quirky in the extreme. Thirty-minute piano pieces made from one note at a time and each note the vortex of a thousand trajectories. Or his Scruds and Snorts (I think it was called), where he had the idea to realize some of his most unsatisfactory, dysfunctional, and previously abandoned pitch charts and give musical voice to crippled logic. It was like listening to my father try to talk after his stroke.

Jim achieved notoriety early in his career as a pioneer of computer music. Any retrospective memorial to Jim’s work must mention his ground-breaking Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer Tape and his computer-generated score for the film Eakins. These are masterworks regarded by most as essential to the development of computer music.

J. K. Randall, Steven Mackey, and Jim Moses seated

J. K. Randall, Steven Mackey, and Jim Moses sometime in the 1990s. (Photo courtesy Steven Mackey.)

I encountered Jim some 20 years after these works, and the Jim I knew had navigated a unique course well out of view of anything resembling the mainstream. Jim didn’t just get washed up on these exotic shores for lack of ability to navigate the waters around the mainland. He could unpack German masterpieces better than anyone. In his last year before he retired from teaching, we, his colleagues, assigned “late Beethoven” as an area of study for graduate student general exams for the express purpose of hearing Jim tell us what it all meant just one more time. He could explicate objectively verifiable facts like key structures, Schenker spans, and pitch class sets, but he was most interested in what the music was really about or, more precisely, what music might conceivably be about. I remember him being frustrated with a student’s devotion to conventional analytical tools. He said, “Beethoven wasn’t throwing his bed pan around the room because he was worried about his fuckin’ Ur Linie.” At my colleague Scott Burnham’s job interview some 20-plus years ago, Scott presented work from his dissertation and quoted a metaphor from A.B. Marx. Marx had described a passage from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony saying it was like “Napoleon mounting his trusty steed.” Snickering filled the room until Jim stood in defense of both Marx and Burnham by pointing out the pathetic irony that we are more comfortable limiting the scope of Beethoven’s music to tonics and dominants rather than with allowing this music any aspirations toward illuminating the recesses of the human psyche.

Dozens of times I heard him challenge someone who described something as “making sense,” by asking them what kind of sense. His Beethoven, especially his beloved late Beethoven, was far removed from the normative example of common practice tonality that I was taught. It was, like Jim’s own late music, radical and unsettling.

Jim was a high-octane intellectual, one of the few people in the world with a brain big enough to transcend the intellect. He brought maximum intensity to everything he did, whether it was working out a pitch chart, watching a ball game, or eating a ham sandwich. He chose to make music a rare and deep experience and not just Beethoven. He would choke up when Charlie Rich sang “When We Get Behind Closed Doors” or when his favorite Irish tenor would sing “Danny Boy.” He binged on Shostakovich long before that was fashionable. He once said that “Rachmaninoff is what all music should be.”

Long after he was no longer a player in the contemporary music world he continued to listen, compose, and write with relentless integrity and passion, and his work had an enormous impact on those who were lucky enough to engage it. The single most enduring impact that Jim made on me was to embrace composition as a process of discovery rather than an explanation. He composed to explore what music might be capable of saying, not to tell an audience what he knew.

Ciao Manhattan: A Remembrance of Lee Hyla (1952-2014)

Posted on June 12, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

Lee Hyla

Lee Hyla in 1979. Photo by Glenn Gass.

In 1974, Lee Hyla asked me to turn pages for pianist Rebecca LaBrecque during the recording of his Piano Concerto No. 1 at the WGBH studios in Boston. The piece and the session ended with an incredible and very emotional piano solo that took several takes and intense coaching from Lee, with Becky digging deeper and deeper into each take to get at the core of the music, after which she lowered her head onto the piano keys and sobbed uncontrollably, overcome by the intense emotion of the music. Lee immediately came out of the recording booth to console her, they sat on the bench together in silence for what seemed to be an eternity; it is one of the most poignant musical and personal moments that I can recall. It solidified my desire to compose.

On June 6, the terrible news came out of Chicago. We had lost Lee Hyla to complications resulting from pneumonia. I knew that he had been ill recently, but this news was too shocking to believe.

After the news broke, the Facebook posts and blog entries started to appear: “He was the best of us.” “One of my heroes.” “A composer’s composer.” “The music world has lost a true giant.”All true—Lee’s influence ran wide and deep. His music is honest, as honest as it gets, and gut wrenchingly powerful. As the stylistic tides shifted around him, he stuck to his own unique brand of gritty rock and free-jazz infused modernism; his early works were equal parts Elliott Carter, Cecil Taylor, and James Brown.

His break out piece, Pre-Pulse Suspended (1984), commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and premiered at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and In Double Light (1983) are good introductions to his earlier music, both featuring his longtime artistic collaborator Tim Smith on bass clarinet. We Speak Etruscan (1992), written for Tim Smith and Tim Berne, is also a must-listen. Most of his pieces are powerfully rhythmic, and display a depth of musical and structural insight that few composers ever achieve.
And Lee was not afraid to venture into an Eastern European-tinged lyricism when the music called for it; the cimbalom makes an appearance in many of his works. The brilliant Polish Folk Songs (2007), written for Boston Musica Viva, is the most overt reference to his Polish roots.

Birdsong was also a big influence, most recently in the Firebird Ensemble-commissioned piece Field Guide (2006). It is also present in his wailing and raucous solo piece, Mythic Birds of Saugerties (1985), a piece that significantly raised the bar for bass clarinet writing when it appeared, and the Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra (1988) both written for and performed brilliantly by Tim Smith, as well as in Wilson’s Ivory Bill (2000) that includes an archival field recording of the very rare ivory-billed woodpecker.
Although born in Niagara Falls, New York, Lee Hyla grew up in Greencastle, Indiana, and played in rock bands as a teenager. He was a formidable keyboardist, a hometown star. He got the call one day to fill the keyboard spot in Stephen Stills’s band, but instead decided that he wanted to go east to study composition at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, which was where I met him. We were both students at NEC in the early ’70s, studying with Malcolm Peyton, and we became lifelong close friends.
During the ‘70s in Boston, the Symphony Road apartment that he shared with Tim Smith was a cockroach infested student pad. (The roaches got so bad at Symphony Road one winter that Lee killed the biggest one and propped it up against the wall as a lesson to the others. It didn’t work.) It was home to the Symphony Road Improvisation Ensemble, a free jazz trio with Lee (piano), Tim Smith (reeds), and virtuoso bassist Alan Nagel. The trio became the core of Lee’s first major piece, Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra No. 1 (1974), which had an extensive alto sax part written for Tim. Saxophone and bass clarinet were go-to instruments for Lee in the early years in Boston, and the musical collaboration that he started with Tim continued for decades. It was his longest and most productive. At night, 3 Symphony Road, and later his Frost Street apartment in Cambridge, became the place where we would play poker, make insane multi-channel tape collages, play intense board hockey (how nerdy was that?), drink, and listen to all sorts of music. First it was Lee, Tim, Alan, and myself, and when Glenn Gass—Lee’s first student and very close childhood friend from Greencastle—came to Boston to study with Malcolm Peyton, Glenn, along with Anthony Coleman, completed the motley crew. Ezra Sims was also an honorary senior member of the gang and mentor to Lee and others for many years.

Glenn Gass and Lee Hyla outside Jordan Hall in 1977. (Photo by Clinton Gass.)

Glenn Gass and Lee Hyla outside Jordan Hall in 1977. (Photo by Clinton Gass.)

Lee was the “Alpha Composer,” charismatic, at the center of things. Not only composers, but jazz musicians and creative improvisers revered him, his creative energy was infectious. Everybody wanted a part of it, and he was happy to oblige.
After Boston, Lee, Alan, and Tim went on to do graduate work at Stony Brook where the circle widened to include percussionist Jim Pugliese (a close friend whose brilliant drums and percussion are featured in so many of Lee’s works), Rick Sacks, and composer Christopher Butterfield. There was a brief stint playing with the punk band Klo in Toronto with Chris, Rick, and Alan. (Lee played keyboards, wore weird sunglasses, and assumed the punk name “Lee Castro.”)

After Canada, when we both lived in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, Lee was my go-to person when I needed feedback on a work in progress, and I would sometimes do the same for him. I remember him playing a fifteen-minute string trio for me that he had just composed in the Bond Street loft, on the piano, by heart, twitching, vocalizing, rocking, and with the intensity of Cecil Taylor. I learned more from watching him perform his own composition from memory than I did from years of composition lessons. You have to be inside of the music, know and believe in every note, and when Lee was way inside of his music, it was hard for the listener not to be there, too.

Lee and Joan Silber’s annual New Year’s Day parties at the Bond Street loft were always packed with musicians, writers, and artists, with Lee at the center dressed in a bathrobe and tube socks the whole day, cooking the finest homemade Polish cuisine you could imagine. Debbie Harry showed up one year. The parties continued in Boston and then Chicago where Lee and his wife, painter Katherine Desjardins, brought the new music community together each year on that day. These parties were legendary.

Composers Softball Team

Composers softball team, 1976:
(back row left to right) Tim Smith, unknown, Lee Hyla, Al Sarko, David Cleary, unknown
(Front row) Unknown child, Allen Anderson, Mathew Rosenblum, Jeff Klein, Hankus Netsky, unknown. Photo by Glenn Gass.

Lee and Ted Mook produced my first solo CD, Ancient Eyes, issued on CRI (now part of New World Records); Lee was in the recording booth. I was terrified, totally tongue tied, freaking out. Lee took charge of the session, communicating with Brad Lubman and the performers through the mic in the booth, skillfully, carefully, precisely, with amazing grace, and with big results.
Lee had an incredible way of helping performers realize exactly what was needed in a piece, and he did so in dramatic fashion, singing and contorting, percussive sound effects included, and performers loved working with him. He had lasting professional and personal relationships with Rhonda Ryder, the Lydian String Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Stephen Drury, Ted Mook, Jim Pugliese, Eric Moe, Mary Nessinger, and, of course, Tim Smith, among many others.

After vowing that he would stay out of the academy, Lee got the call from Malcolm Peyton, his former teacher and chair of composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. This time he said yes. He was an extraordinary teacher with many dedicated students, to whom he was equally dedicated. He left NEC in 2007 to become Northwestern University’s Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Professor of Theory and Composition. Boston gave him an epic series of farewell concerts. Boston loved Lee, and the feelings were mutual; I’m sure the departure was bitter sweet.

What I remember and cherish the most were the long nights hanging out with a small circle of friends at the Symphony Road and Frost Street apartments in the ‘70s, the Bond Street loft and the Great Jones Café (across the street from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s studio – we would see the lights burning late at night) in the ‘80s, listening to an eclectic mix of Hank Williams, James Brown, Neil Young, Captain Beefheart, and Glenn Branca, ruminating about the World Series chances for the Red Sox, the American League standings, and the state of new music.
Lee was given almost every honor available to an American composer, but it seemed like he deserved much more: more performances, a Pulitzer, increased international attention. He formed a great relationship with John Zorn and most of his later works are found on Zorn’s Tzadik label. His recent travels to New York would routinely include visits with Tim Smith, Jim Pugliese, and John Zorn.

When Lee won the Rome Prize, we threw a big “Ciao Manhattan” party for him at my East 13th Street apartment. It was a great send off with everyone from Tim Berne to David Lang among the guests. We had a tradition of calling each other on our birthdays, without fail the call would come in. This year his voice was a bit weaker, it had been a tough winter, a hospital stay, summer plans were tenuous, but he would be back in Boston for a festival of his music in June, he was looking forward to it.
Lee was about people. Whether you were a student, a friend, or colleague, you knew he really cared. And Lee’s music has the power to change lives—it changed mine, and this is a huge gift that he left. As important, he was a true and supportive friend to many all these years. He was the center of a huge community of musicians. As saxophonist Marty Ehrlich recently pointed out to me, “Lee cared about all of us, and not just on the surface. You are blessed if you have a few people like that in your life.”
We will miss you deeply, Lee.

Hyla Near Prudential Building

Lee Hyla in Boston in the late 1970s, photo by Glenn Glass

Elodie Lauten (1950-2014): Channeling Cosmic Forces

Posted on June 11, 2014 by - Headlines, Ledes

Elodie Lauten

Elodie Lauten in 2011 (photo by Rod Goodman for LESPA inc.)

Praise, admiration, and respect in elegy for the artiste-musicienne composer Elodie Lauten continue to resound since her death on June 3, 2014, with tributes far and wide: she was distinguished, diverse, cross-cultural, international, and—as per her own quest—even cosmic. With conviction and certainty, she proselytized about the scientific-magical powers of music, its essential role in the course of the universe. While she marveled at exploring sound potentials in electronic music, microtonal and foreign idioms, above all else she wanted her music to be performed acoustically with the detailed nuances of Baroque music, and she altogether respected vocal (or as instrumental) lyricism, counterpoint, idiomatic instrumental sounds, and traditional orchestration. She smiled with glee when comparing her music to that of early French masters Lully and Rameau, then of course, Faure, Debussy, Messiaen—realizing that indeed she, and truly all of us, live and work in the ongoing cycle of tradition. She loved and respected music as a spiritual force and, with the wisdom of a sage, passionately instilled in others its importance, power, and significance. Using music, she nobly changed lives; there is no greater compliment.

For the past year, I worked closely with Elodie preparing the debut of the now-definitive version of her opera Waking in New York on the libretto crafted so purposefully by hero-poet of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg. Vibrant and contemporary, altogether it unites old and new world musical styles to express visionary poetry that is considered the voice of modern life. Much admired for its message about community, love, and friendship, it is altogether one of the most beautiful and poignant scores I have ever had the privilege to lead. Though always persnickety and precise about musical details, it was moreover inspiring to witness Elodie praise a young virtuoso, crystalline-pure singer (“my favorite voice type,” she said) with, “That was so enchanting. Do you realize that with such a marvelous sound wave, how you’ve created such a beautiful moment into eternity? Now let me tell you about its meaning; [like Messiaen] it has a . . . (blue, red, yellow) color aura.”

Early this spring, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts gave its 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Award to Elodie Lauten, a peer-nominated accolade recognizing her exactly: for her innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation. This truly honored, humbled, and then inspired her. In his recent tribute, Kyle Gann recognized Elodie’s capacity to create new, certainly inventive, platforms for her music, but stated that it was accomplished by sacrificing herself and living in a state “near-penury.” Actually Elodie was an excellent and hardy businesswoman—skills she claimed were instilled in her from her father, the great jazz pianist (and sculptor) Errol Parker. She was a model of the modern artist’s lifestyle: simple living, strong development-funding skills, “everything lives for the music.” She consistently produced respectable productions of her works, altogether treating (and promptly paying!) musicians as professionals. (Now, in retrospect, they all comment on this.) With her Rauschenberg Award, and also the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on her support team, she envisioned a future for her music launched with her testament opera, Waking in New York.

Arriving so chic in a re-styled mink coat (after all, her mother was a noted fashion doyenne with a boutique nearby Paris’s Arc de Triomphe), I accompanied Elodie as she braved New York City’s bitter cold winter, traveling in a friend’s donated gypsy courier limousine from the Lower East Side up to 7th Avenue and 29th Street, to proudly become a professional member (for the first time) of OPERA America. It was a major step for her. She launched her association with our week-long public rehearsal and video filming at OPERA America’s splendid National Opera Center. Surprising and delighting her, the uptown refined national opera association enthusiastically and respectfully welcomed this funky downtown composer into their ranks with glee, full of cutting-edge marketing ideas for production and promotion. Following this meeting, living the appreciative life-of-the-moment she professed, we chose lunch at a nearby café because they displayed flower-shaped cookies painted with psychedelic-colored marzipan. Elodie noted, “Allen is with us… How can we resist?”

Waking in New York program

The program for the June 1, 2014 performance of Waking In New York featuring Elodie Lauten’s design.

Over the few months since that special day, surely a turning point in her career, Elodie suddenly began her health decline through a sequence of challenges. She was secretive about her condition, steadfast to keep her strong producer-composer image, always managing business details along with the artistic particulars. We rehearsed with the brilliant cast (Mark Duer, Meredith Borden, Catherine Rothrock, and Mary Hurlbut) in Elodie’s large, open studio apartment, with its range of keyboard instruments, acoustic and electronic—some of her own design patents. Elodie would recline almost glamorously on a sofa at the end of the room and listen to the rehearsal, always stopping to discuss “what” Ginsberg’s poetry “meant” with enthusiasm for the details of prosody expounded by great singers. Her coughing and wheezing she would dismiss as “allergies.” To the few of us alert to her declining condition, she vowed that she was “determined to live through for this performance: her music brought to life so splendidly.”

When moved to the hospital “for tests and a few treatments,” she joined and commented on our now-expanded rehearsals, including a celebrity orchestral team, by first complaining about and then even helping construct connections for the hospital’s wireless Skype connections. When finally she was moved to palliative hospice care, still in secret to the cast, declaring, “I want them focused on my music, not on me,” I brought to her bedside on May 31 the superb, just edited film/streaming-broadcast from the National Opera Center made the day before and a copy of the just-arrived, multi-colored printed program. (She even designed the cover artwork.) Always gasping for air in her last days, she grabbed my hand, removed her oxygen mask and muttered the words, “Oh, so beautiful, thank you.”


On Sunday afternoon June 1, she was aware of the successful, well-received public performance at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. She died on Tuesday, June 3 at 7:15 p.m.—uncannily, on Allen Ginsberg’s birthday.

Kooky, quirky, yet all-the-time brilliant, Elodie brought passion to life, igniting human spirits. Even stories of her travel escapades—when lost, she would rub various colored-crystals to find directions (it worked!)—suddenly make the rest of us wonder and dream and ride along with her with confidence. Brilliant and engaging through her collaborative music, poetry, and visual multi-arts—indeed the true definition of her operas—she continues to ponder, guide, and foster a beautiful, eternal life journey.

Waking in New York cast

From the June 1st performance of Elodie Lauten-Allen Ginsberg’s opera Waking in New York at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (photo by Milton Fletcher).

Boston: Caroline Shaw’s Common Cause

Posted on May 21, 2014 by - Field Reports, Headlines

"Your Second or Permanent Teeth" (anatomical diagram)

From Harrison Wader Ferguson, D.D.S., A Child’s Book of the Teeth (1922).

In his 1547 treatise Dodecachordon, Heinrich Glarean, having lionized the likes of Obrecht, Ockeghem, and Josquin (especially Josquin), made sure—like you do—to despair that the younger generation was ruining everything. To be sure, even Josquin had his infelicitous moments: “in some places in his songs he did not fully and properly restrain his impetuous talent, although this ordinary fault may be condoned because of his otherwise incomparable gifts.” Those coming after Josquin, however, made this exception the rule, as Glarean complained:

The art now displays such unrestraint that learned men are nearly sick of it. This has many causes, but mostly it is because composers are ashamed to follow in the footsteps of predecessors who observed the relation of modes exactly; we have fallen into another, distorted style of song which is in no way pleasing—it is only new.

It was probably coincidental that, for the May 10 and 11 premiere performances of Caroline Shaw’s Music in Common Time, the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and the string ensemble A Far Cry preceded the piece with Josquin at his most elegantly, explicitly generational: his “Déploration” on the death of his elder colleague Johannes Ockeghem (in an arrangement by Shaw). But, then again, after winning the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for her Partita (the youngest composer to ever receive the honor), Shaw came in for a share of Glarean-like grief courtesy of John Adams, who implicitly held Shaw up as an example of “extremely simplistic, user-friendly, lightweight” music: “People are winning Pulitzer Prizes writing this stuff now.” He went on:

If you read a lot of history, which I do, you see that civilizations produce periods of high culture, and then they can fall into periods of absolute mediocrity that can go on for generation after generation.

So to have the “Déploration” on the program, that road from Ockeghem to Josquin to implied musical perdition, was a nice reminder that, if you read even a little history, you see that these sorts of bumpy transitions are nothing new. Music in Common Time is, among other things, a border stone marking one of those most porous yet most impassible of barriers: a proximate, parapatric stylistic divide.

* * *

A Far Cry, seven seasons old, has, since 2010, been the in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (where I heard this program on May 11). They are a conductorless gang of energetic fashion. (Their standard-repertoire contribution to the program, Mahler’s string-orchestra arrangement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810), was incessantly high-contrast and bracing.) Roomful of Teeth charts a line between musical polish and enthusiasm. Their singing in the Josquin, for instance, channeled the precision of an early music outfit but eschewed the homogeneity: individual voices could still be heard amidst the collective. Both groups are cut from similar cloth: younger-skewing ensembles proficient enough to slip into the churn of the classical-music performance business, and idiosyncratic enough to create the sense that they’re reprogramming the machine. An additional layer of professional and personal connections between the two groups (which Shaw hinted at in a breezy program note) made for a natural collaboration; Shaw’s new piece—somewhat mind-bendingly, her first formal commission—provided the occasion.

Music in Common Time is not quite a concerto, although the eight voices tend to move more as a unified group than the string orchestra, which is frequently divided into distinct factions. An opening stretch—a staggered, rising, arpeggiated triad (D major, picking up where Partita left off)—shifts into the sturdiest of diatonic progressions, then gives way to a vocal break, one of two sections with text: “Over the roads,” the voices sing, in a tongue-twisting interlude of traveling music. (That dialectic, one ensemble gently interrupting the other, happens throughout.) After a bit of folk-tinged, almost Holst-like atmosphere, the opening section returns, only to be undercut by thickets of snap-pizzicato, becoming a conventionally plucked accompaniment, over which the voices embark on a short study in portamento, sliding up and down into pure harmonies.

The center of the piece was engrossing, a negotiation between a perpetually rising sequence of secondary dominants in the strings and faster, descending parallel chords in the voices, occasionally meeting up for chance cadences. It was chased with a brief dose of ringing-partial throat-singing—one of the piece’s few congruences with Partita’s more exuberant kitchen sink of vocal techniques. That led to the final section: first the voices introduced another bit of sentimentally elusive text (“years ago, I forget; years to come, just let them”) set as a sweetly unsteady shape-note sing; then a tranquil standoff of a coda, half the strings staying put while the other half, along with the voices, moved to a different key center.

The overall effect is that of a linked chain, a point-to-point sojourn. Arrivals are based less on contrapuntal resolution and more on the satisfying effect of a particular sonority. (The sound of a widely spaced triad—roots, thirds, and fifths saturating the overtone spectrum—is a recurring component; it also featured in Shaw’s Josquin arrangement, suboctaves from the double basses trundling in to give crucial harmonies a boost of widescreen warmth.)

But what’s most interesting about Music in Common Time is its relationship to style. Current usage of the term “post-minimalist” can be a little squishy, but in a way that goes beyond historical chronology (and to a more immediately apparent extent than Partita), Music in Common Time is truly post-minimalist, at least in the lower-case sense: the structure and gist are not minimalist, but almost all of its building blocks are minimalist signifiers, tropes and gestures that evolved along with minimalist practice. The triad as object; overlapping consonance as a stretched canvas; the chord-to-chord movement of basic progressions turned into scene and act breaks; variation via altered phrase length rather than elaborated melody—all of these figure into Shaw’s rhetoric, but in a way far removed from minimalism’s deliberate, patient process.

The tropes become objects of recognition at least as much as objects of exploration; the garnishes—the Bartók pizzicato, the more exotic vocal excursions, the polytonality—play off of expectations of what we might be accustomed to hearing those other ideas do in a minimalist context. In other words, Shaw is most definitely not observing the relation of modes exactly, at least by the lights of her elders. Which is as it should be. Music always does this, always has done this, always will do this. Music in Common Time is only unusual in the genial straightforwardness with which it repurposes inherited goods.

It reminded me of my favorite piece of curmudgeonly compositional grumbling, coming a century after Heinrich Glarean, when the Baroque era was just getting traction, but was far enough along for Samuel Scheidt to complain about where things were headed:

I am astonished at the foolish music written in these times…. It certainly must be a remarkably elevated art when a pile of consonances are thrown together any which way.

This is both supremely sarcastic and basically true. It is a remarkably elevated art that is so incapable of settling down, constantly inspiring its practitioners to use the output of one set of rules as the input for a completely different set of rules. Musical style is a moving target. It certainly must be.