Recently Departed
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew Imbrie, Susan Blake, Gerhard Bronner, Martin M. Streicher, Ron Mazurek
Karlheinz Stockhausen (August 22, 1928 - Dec. 7, 2007), “a musician in the profoundest sense.” Both a rationalist and a mystic, the composer’s influence stretched from Boulez to the Beatles. Karlheinz Stockhausen… was one of the great visionaries of 20th century music. He was fond of quoting Blake’s lines “He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise”; and like Blake, the pursuit of his vision led him down strange, and often awkward paths. The results earned him a reverence among a cult following which is unique among 20th century composers; but they also earned him a fair amount of ridicule. Roger Scruton’s memorable judgment, that Stockhausen “is not so much an Emperor with no clothing, but a splendid set of clothes with no Emperor” sums up the skeptical view, which in Anglo-Saxon countries has become the dominant one since the 1970s.
When Stockhausen was 18, and a music-student in war-devastated Cologne, he read Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. This crystallized the conviction, already forming within him, that “the highest calling of mankind can only be to become a musician in the profoundest sense; to conceive and shape the world musically.”
Stockhausen had reason enough to avert his eyes from the world as it was. His early life was tormented by Nazism and the war it had unleashed. When he was six years old his mother had been taken into an insane asylum; nine years later she was one of the victims of the Nazis enforced euthanasia policy. Meanwhile his father had become an enthusiastic Nazi, and eventually fought on the Eastern front, where he went missing and was presumed dead. Stockhausen recalled how as a boy [he was, incidentally, briefly a member of the Hitler Youth] he heard marching songs played incessantly on the radio, an experience which left him with an abiding hatred of regular repetitive rhythms in music. Not all his early experiences were negative ones. The boy was profoundly impressed by the Catholic ritual of rural Germany, where his father had been a schoolteacher; the Easter procession of young girls was recalled, 45 years later, in Act 2 of Montag, one of the cycle of seven linked music-dramas named Licht (Light) to which Stockhausen devoted the last third of his life.
All this might create the impression of a musical crank with a taste for electronics and vast stage spectacles. What is often forgotten, in the noisy polemics around Stockhausen, is the fact that his visions were put into practice with a colossal speculative and practical intelligence, which earned him the respect and enthusiasm of musicians as diverse as Boulez and the Beatles….
Olivier Messiaen’s experiments in extending arithmetical forms of organization beyond pitch, to embrace rhythm, timbre and dynamics, confirmed Stockhausen in his belief that this was the way forward. But over the next few years he was to take the serial ideas into wholly now areas. Like Ligeti and Boulez, he passed through a “pointillist” phase, in which the texture is splintered into individual notes, and like them, he soon became dissatisfied with it. Several key works of the 1950s, all since confirmed as classics of the century’s music, found a new way of utilizing the serial idea, in which the elements to be organized were no longer “points”, but groups of variable length, each defined by certain overall features such as speed, density and range. His most famous (and some would say best) piece, Gruppen, has a marvelous exuberance, in which fantasy and rigor feed off one another….
Is it true, as the more extreme of young historicists claim, that Stockhausen is nothing but a symptom of an aberration in the history of music? If one based one’s view of his achievement on Licht, so often theatrically naive and musically otiose, the answer might well be yes. But taken as a whole, Stockhausen’s achievement must be the most fertile in ideas, if not of perfectly achieved works, of any composer of the 20th century. Those ideas are strenuous, boldly speculative, and high-minded in a way that doesn’t really suit our more cautious age; but when the time to explore and dream comes again, Stockhausen’s music will be waiting for it.” (Excerpts from Ivan Hewett’s obituary in the Guardian Unlimited, Dec. 7, 2007)
Andrew Imbrie (April 6, 1921 - Dec. 5, 2007), remembered for his teaching.
There may be no easier or more thoughtless way to dismiss a creative artist than with the epithet “academic.” The term brings with it a whole array of negative connotations: rigid thinking, blind adherence to rules, a lack of flair or imagination.
But the word can be understood in a positive light as well. An academic, after all, is ideally someone who has probed deeply into the workings of his or her chosen subject, and who uses intellect to reach a level of understanding that isn’t available through other means.
Andrew Imbrie, who died earlier this month at 86, was an academic composer in that better, more valuable sense.
It isn’t merely the biographical outline of his career that makes me say so, although that is part of it. He started composing in earnest as a student at Princeton, then followed his teacher, Roger Sessions, to the Bay Area, where he taught at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for more than 40 years.
”Imbrie was active as a composer and a thinker about music,” said composer Olly Wilson, who taught alongside Imbrie for decades at UC Berkeley, “which made him an ideal person to have around a university.”
I second that emotion. As a graduate student in the UC music department more than 20 years ago, I was fortunate enough to witness and learn from Imbrie’s musical virtuosity during a number of classes, and those lessons have stayed with me ever since.
Imbrie’s method was simplicity itself. He would collect the week’s assignments, bring them to the piano and start to sight-read through those messy, mistake-laden scraps of music paper. Then he would begin to fix things.
His eye for error was swift and impeccable. In the course of a single read-through, he could detect flaws in voice-leading, ferret out misplaced harmonies or rhythms and spot the clashes that can creep unnoticed into the intricate combinatorial textures of a fugue. And as soon as he found a problem, he had a solution ready.
His corrections could be aesthetic as well as grammatical. As a longtime crossword constructor, I found the interdependent rules of fugue writing fairly easy to follow; but I’m no composer, and my exercises were generally as dull as they were correct. Imbrie had something to offer here, too.
“Let’s just send the soprano line up a bit here,” he’d say, and with his blue pencil he would quickly sketch an alternative phrase that was just as faithful to the rules but infinitely more pliant and beautiful than my flat-footed creation.
“This is what it means,” I used to think, “to have the language of music entirely at your fingertips.”
That observation was strengthened by watching my composer classmates in action, because there was a direct correlation between their ability to write a fugue and their ability to compose, period. The students who, like Imbrie, could master the requirements of the fugue—or were willing to learn—could also master the requirements of music in general. Those who couldn’t, couldn’t.
After Imbrie’s death, I was impelled to revisit his 1984 Requiem, a potent and persuasive demonstration of this exact idea. Written on a commission from the San Francisco Symphony, the piece is a memorial for Imbrie’s son John, who died of heart failure at 19; like Britten’s War Requiem, it combines the Latin Mass with poems by Donne, Blake and Herbert.
To listen to this music now, on a superb CD on the Bridge label, is to marvel again at the expressive power that Imbrie’s technical ability made available to him.
The gorgeous, transparent counterpoint of the opening “Requiem and Kyrie”; the unpredictable but sure-footed melody of his setting of Blake’s “To the Evening Star,” sung with haunting sweetness by soprano Lisa Saffer; the dramatic alternation of chorus and orchestra in the wondrously concise “Offertory”—all of these are the marks of an artist who could erect a lasting memorial out of emotional urgency and sheer know-how.
Requiescat in pace.
(Excerpts from a tribute by Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle Dec. 23, 2007) [E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com or visit the SFGate website.]
Susan Blake (June 18, 1953 - Oct. 2, 2007) The Coordinator for many decades of PeaceSmiths in Amityville, NY, a faithful and valiant member of the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus, who also facilitated and participated in premieres of works by Siegmeister, Joel Mandelbaum, and this writer, as noted last issue, was Susan Blake, who passed away at age 54. The premiere of my Bloody Kansas, conducted in November by Mandelbaum at Queens and Hunter Colleges, was dedicated to her memory, as will be the opera I am writing with Kim Rich entitled Alger: An Opera About Alger Hiss. It was Susan who brought us, and so many others, together. She will be deeply missed. Tributes to her, which appeared in the N.Y. Times, Newsday, and elsewhere, can be read here. (Leonard J. Lehrman)
Gerhard Bronner (Oct. 23, 1922-Jan. 19, 2007). Another great loss this past year was that of Gerhard Bronner, the great Viennese cabarettist and translator into Viennese German of nearly every great pre-Sondheim American musical theatre classic, from My Fair Lady to Fiddler on the Roof and How to Succeed. The creator or co-creator of music and lyrics for over 3,000 songs, he was in many ways what he called himself, “sort of the Tom Lehrer of Vienna.” I had the honor of translating a number of his songs into English, which I have posted on my website; he returned the favor by translating a number of mine (including “Every Boy Should Have A Jewish Mother”) into German. He also translated Seymour Barab’s “Franchise” from the opera Jewish Humor from Oy to Vey, and then wrote a new version with his own music. He too will be sorely missed. (Leonard J. Lehrman)
Martin M. Streicher (May 1, 1935 - Sept. 14, 2007), public relations specialist for the arts.
[Beloved husband, father, grandfather. Survived by Roberta Streicher, Eric Streicher, Una Streicher and Lynda Ciolek]
Marty enjoyed a full life in the arts. He graduated from Goodman Theatre in Chicago and then moved to New York City to begin his career as an actor on Broadway. Subsequently, Marty was Executive Producer of the John Brownlee Opera Theatre at Manhattan School of Music for 10 years, and served as Executive Producer of the TeenAge Performing Arts Workshop, a four-year, $4-million grant project for the New York City Board of Education. He was also production manager of the Little Orchestra Society at Lincoln Center.
Marty was proud to own “Words and Music” Theatre, producing shows under that banner in New York and Detroit. Additionally, for many years, he generously gave his time, creativity and considerable skills to Steorra Enterprises, a full-range public relations firm specializing in classical music promotion.
Longtime friend, Scottish singer Jean Redpath remarked, “I am grateful to have known him for so long, and weep for the loss of a friend and mentor, a man I turned to again and again for counseling or kibbitzing, for professional guidance, endless encouragement and support—and numberless blue jokes.”
Marty was an ardent amateur photographer, a computer wiz and a devoted Chicago Bears and Cubs fan. He will be missed. (Steorra)
Some further thoughts on Ron Mazurek, teacher and friend (whose obituary appeared in our last issue)
I had the great blessing to know Dr. Ron Mazurek from September of 1986 to his passing on to eternity with God. For all those years, he was a constant source of comfort to me by his willingness to care about my future. I always knew that whenever I could not figure something out that Dr. Mazurek would give of himself in some way to help me in my crisis. He was literally a phone call away, and thus he will be missed by me for as long as I live.
His strength as a composition teacher was remarkable and truly unique. Dr. Mazurek was able to penetrate beyond the syntactic world of music to its deeper levels where the essence of music lives. And because of this deep understand of music as language, Dr. Mazurek helped me and many others to cross over the bridge of the syntactic world into the world of music as metaphor.
Dr. Mazurek knew that the times that he lived in required a revolutionary approach for the contemporary composer. He was a self-promoter, a performer, a teacher, a composer, a producer, and he employed all the roles that are necessary today to further the career and the music of a composer. Therefore, he was a model for all composers of the new generation.
As an anecdote, I once asked him why music was important. His answer shows that he knew for a long time its role in our lives. To paraphrase his answer, he said, “Would the world be better without new music?” Hopefully, one of our ambitions in this world will be to leave it a better place. Dr. Ron Mazurek made that possible by the fruits of his love for his family, his friends, and his students. (Helmut Christoferus Calabrese)
