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Remembering Leon Kirchner
1919-2009

Thoughts and remembrances of the composer, conductor, pianist, & professor

The Boston Globe, September 18, 2009
Jeremy Eichler

[excerpt]

Kirchner’s music was bold and urgent, often charged with a smoldering intensity and a powerful expressive drive. His Third String Quartet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, and he was the recipient of many of his field’s highest honors.

“An artist must create a personal cosmos,’’ he once declared, “a verdant world in continuity with tradition.’’ His body of work—which included solo piano pieces, four quartets, two trios, concertos and orchestral works, and one opera—powerfully bore out that vision.

It was a musical cosmos in sway to its own set of original rules. Mr. Kirchner adopted a challenging modernist language but avoided the strict 12-tone methods that became fashionable in the post-war decades.

Mr. Kirchner was born into an immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn but moved at an early age to Los Angeles, arriving at a time when the city had become home to a number of Europe’s most prominent composers, including Arnold Schoenberg. Mr. Kirchner also studied with Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions, but it was Schoenberg who became his most influential teacher and, in later decades, an ethical lodestar whose integrity he deeply admired.

Even as a young composer, the force of Mr. Kirchner’s music was unmistakable. In a 1950 review in the journal “Notes,’’ composer Aaron Copland wrote that “the impression carried away from a Kirchner performance is one of having made contact not merely with a composer, but with a highly sentient human being; of a man who creates his music out of an awareness of the special climate of today’s unsettled world. Kirchner’s best pages prove that he reacts strongly to that world; they are charged with an emotional impact and explosive power that is almost frightening in intensity.’’

Over the years, Mr. Kirchner’s music attracted several prominent champions, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma and conductor James Levine, who last year led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Kirchner’s orchestral work The Forbidden.

Mr. Kirchner came to Harvard in 1961 and eventually assumed an endowed chair previously held by the composer Walter Piston. At Harvard he became a revered pedagogue and the founder of a highly regarded course, Music 180, that creatively combined the performance and the analysis of music. Among the early students in the course were Ma, violinist James Buswell, and violinist Lynn Chang.

Robert Levin, the Harvard music professor who now teaches Kirchner’s storied course, also emphasized how much Kirchner gave to his students.

“Leon’s monument is just as much for those who were fortunate enough to experience him as a teacher,’’ said Levin, “as for those who have been transformed by the urgency and intensity of his music.’’
To many in Boston’s musical public, Mr. Kirchner was best known as the conductor of the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, whose concerts, especially performances of Bruckner and Schoenberg, became essential local events.
“Performing is a level where all the talking and theorizing stops, a completely different way to solve life’s problems,’’ Kirchner told a Globe interviewer in 1982. “It’s a test being up there, and it’s important for creative people to be tested. A performer calls upon things in himself that are otherwise dormant, and his whole life process becomes revitalized.’’

On one occasion in the 1970s, Mr. Kirchner wrote to the Globe congratulating a colleague with words that might have been applied to their author: “We might cheer you,’’ he wrote, “simply for standing erect after all these years under the heavy weight of public honor, constant effort, and that special travail which comes to all who have the temerity to orbit some inner region of the soul.’’

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Leon Kirchner's Leaps of Faith
           
Dorothy Lamb Crawford

My husband, John (Jack) Crawford, PhD. '63, was the first graduate student whose work on a twentieth-century dissertation Leon advised when he came to the Harvard Music Department from teaching undergraduates at Mills College since 1954.  Soon after Leon’s arrival in 1961 they met to discuss Jack's topic, "The Relationship of Text and Music in the Vocal Works of Schoenberg, 1908-1924," that is, vocal works of Schoenberg's expressionist period. Jack was just back from a research year in Vienna and was well along with the dissertation. Expressionism, a mode in the arts arising from the psyche, often as the result of personal crisis, was not on Leon's mind as he mandated a basic change in approach, which included much greater emphasis on functional harmonic analysis in the discussion of Schoenberg's song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. At the end of their two-hour, upsetting conference, Jack didn't realize his foot had gone to sleep; he fell and sprained an ankle as he stood up.  Somehow, out of the crisis that threatened to turn Jack's thesis on its head, there developed a respect and affection between them. When appropriate, a certain amount of harmonic analysis crept into the dissertation, which, with approval from Leon, survived as a work on musical expressionism. After we had performed Schoenberg's cycle at the Gardner Museum, Leon invited us to repeat the performance for one of his Harvard classes. Over 30 years later and after a lot of performing experience as well as research, Jack and I, realizing that there was no book-length treatment of the subject in English, expanded the knowledge gained in work on his dissertation into a book, Expressionism in Twentieth Century Music (Indiana University Press, 1993).
 
We moved to California in 1970; Leon would drop in on us (unannounced) when visiting his mother there.  Jack and I became attached to the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles, and I proposed that Leon be honored at a ceremony the Friends of the Institute put on yearly at the Schoenberg villa in Brentwood (Los Angeles). At his celebration, Leon told a tale to the audience about himself as a pre-med student at Los Angeles City College.  (His mother had been determined that he would be a doctor.)  On the campus he heard someone practicing the piano at a high level of competence. His own talent was already so pronounced, and his longing to be a musician so strong, that he jumped through an open window to meet the pianist, who turned out to be Leonard Stein, Schoenberg's assistant. This meeting, and his consequent study under Schoenberg, changed Leon's life. 

When we returned to Massachusetts in 1994 we came with knowledge of Leon's Californian life and--before our boxes were unpacked--he was the first to welcome us. He and his wife Gert shared their Thanksgiving dinners with us for years, until Gert became seriously ill. I helped during her illness.  By then I had published a book on concerts in Los Angeles, Evenings On and Off the Roof (University of California Press, 19959), which included Leon , and I was assigned another, A Windfall of Musicians:  Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (Yale University Press, 2009), which resulted in long interviews in the Kirchner living room.  We were invited to hear Leon play us compositions just completed, to go to Giannino's restaurant in the Charles Hotel when he and Gert were in the mood for meal out, and to their extraordinary New Year’s Eve celebrations.
           
The leap through the window explained much to me, as I thought about Leon during our attempt to assimilate the loss of him:  He had an openness to the possibilities that crossed his path, whether in musical or intellectual matters, or in people.  To these possibilities he applied his acute powers of perception, combined with the energy of spirit that it took to be a Leon Kirchner.  The result was an enormously rich life.  The fullness of his experience is inspiring and invigorating to remember; it is like his music.

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Photograph of Leon Kirchner at his 80th birthday celebration in
Jan. 1999 with his former students Faye-Ellen Silverman and
Leonard Lehrman

Thoughts on Leon Kirchner (1919-2009)

by Leonard J. Lehrman (Harvard class of 1971), Nov. 2009. Originally published in New Music Connoisseur

Leon Kirchner was a force of nature, as pianist, conductor, composer, and musical analyst. In 1966, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Third String Quartet with Electronic Sound, which he had learned about mostly from Morton Subotnick, and never taught any of his students. I sought him out that year for a personal interview, before deciding on whether to attend Harvard College and study composition with him. It took months of phone calls and numerous messages, but I finally did reach him, and set up an appointment, at his home in Cambridge. What I thought would take about an hour ended up lasting over two and a half hours, as he insisted on impressing on me, in detail, the importance of acquiring and studying every note and every word of the Schnabel edition of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas (which of course I then did). At the end of those two and a half hours, he informed me that he had spent that amount of time with me not because of the recommendation I had brought with me from my composition teacher Elie Siegmeister, but because of the regards I had for him from cellist Benar Heifetz (who had played his music at Marlboro), the husband of my piano teacher Olga Heifetz. Indeed, I was to learn, Kirchner generally got along with and had a much higher regard (and use?) for performers than composers.

John Adams, a first-rate clarinetist and conductor who decided to become a composer and studied with Kirchner at Harvard the same years I did, has described him as “devastatingly candid” whose negative assessment “could require weeks for one to recover enough self-esteem to continue.” That was to some extent the effect Kirchner had on me, especially regarding a piece I wrote in his class, inspired by The Living Theatre - and R.D. Laing - called “The Bird of Paradise.” Although it called for a part to be recorded on tape, inspired partly by Kirchner’s Third Quartet, I was not encouraged to find a way to realize that part; Robert Moog told me (in 1970) that there was no way to do it technologically. Today there probably is, perhaps using portions of a recording of a 1970 reading I was allowed to conduct with James Yannatos’s Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra; but Kirchner’s remarks in class, that he liked the first 12 bars of the piece but after that thought I should start over, made me so depressed that the piece has lain dormant ever since. He was also very ambivalent on the question of whether to join a protest against the Vietnam War which would forbid the broadcast of any of his music by American Forces Network. Not so the other composition teacher at Harvard, Earl Kim, who was the first to move for complete amnesty for the war protesters who had occupied University Hall, and later took off a whole year to work for Musicians for Peace and against nuclear war. After two years of study with Kim and one with Kirchner, I went back to Kim.

But Kim’s output as a composer was much more limited than Kirchner’s. Only a handful of Kim’s pieces were available for broadcast on the Harvard radio, whereas Kirchner’s took several hours, in an “orgy” I produced for and on Kirchner’s 50th birthday, Jan. 24, 1969, after which Kirchner took me to lunch.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My freshman year, before getting involved in the radio, I wrote 9 articles, competing to become an editor of the Harvard Crimson. The last two were finally published, on Mar. 4 & 11, 1968: I’ve posted them on my website at
http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/articles/harvardcrimson1.html
and
http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/articles/harvardcrimson2.html

In the first article, I reviewed the Harvard Band. In the final article, I took on the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, in a concert conducted by Kirchner, with his fellow faculty member Luise Vosgerchian (with whom I had also hoped to study) as soloist in his Second Piano Concerto. It was to be a great event, a confluence of the two most dynamic figures on the music department’s faculty.

Unfortunately, Vosgerchian missed some rehearsals due to illness, and when I played through the score Kirchner loaned me, and listened to the recording he had made with Mitropoulos of his First Piano Concerto, I sensed that something was wrong with the performance: He had written a piece inspired by the spirit of Berg and Schoenberg, while she was playing it as if it had been written by Bartók or Stravinsky. It tore me apart, but I felt I had to say it, somehow. When I tried speaking to Vosgerchian about it, she retorted, annoyed: “But I was only playing what the composer wrote and wanted!” Kirchner himself was more reticent. But the following January, he subtly agreed that I had been right. (”Right too soon” was how he once lovingly characterized a Mozart piece he conducted - a recording of which was played at his Miller Theatre memorial - hoping someone would attribute that quality to him too.)

The Kirchner 50th Birthday orgy broadcast an archival recording of a much more sensitive performance of the Second Concerto, by Leon Fleisher, Milton Katims, and the Seattle Symphony. When it looked as though we might not get clearance to broadcast that, I mentioned to Kirchner that we might broadcast the HRO performance. “No,” he said wryly: “You took care of that.” And 30 years later, at his 80th birthday celebration, which I reviewed for Aufbau – please see
http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/articles/aufbau75.html
– he remembered me, with the words: “You once wrote a very important article about my work….”

I wish I could have loved the music he wrote after I started studying with him as much as the music he had written earlier. I came down to New York to hear the premiere of his 1970 Music for Orchestra and review it for WHRB - having given up on the Crimson as too dangerous in terms of department politics - and hated it. (I understand he revised it in 1988.) It seemed so pretentious and empty. I called the station and said I would not be sending a review after all.

His opera Lily was even worse, notwithstanding a few lovely passages, especially for soprano Susan Belling (née Belink, daughter of Cantor Norman Belink, who had trained me for my bar mitzvah and then organized the first Creative Jewish Music Group on Long Island with me). Jack Beeson recently told me a story, not in his recently published book, of how he attended rehearsals and the premiere of Lily at N.Y. City Opera, and watched as Kirchner worked himself into exhaustion, refusing to delegate authority to anyone, spent the dress rehearsal in the hospital, and then muttered after conducting the premiere: “I will never again allow a company to wreck my operas [sic]!” - thus blaming everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes.

So, it is with mixed feelings that I now share my thoughts with you about one of the most important teachers I ever had, from whom I learned a great deal about music, in terms of both what to do and what not to do.

In Remembrance Leon Kirchner (1919-2009)
J. Douglas Davis

Leon Kirchner created extraordinary music that was uniquely his own, expressive thinking that accumulates its language and meaning as it unfolds. He is why I applied to Harvard for my graduate studies in composition. The shock was an acceptance and the award of a 5-year Graduate Prize Fellowship. Some decisions are hard, but at that point with a one-year old at 20, money clarifies, even if it is only $2000 a year with no tuition and teaching duties to be discussed later, and besides… I had heard Leon Kirchner’s First String Quartet. As my encounters with Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker or Bartok’s Violin Concerto had clarified, I lean toward an artistic experience that crushes all with its intensity.

Kirchner’s music felt red-hot. I guess everyone else picked up on his talent almost from the start, and he carried the mantle of an important artist with integrity and intelligence. My talent was modest and merely one of ten in his composition seminar at Harvard.
I remember Leon Kirchner as imperial and I felt a little like an adolescent Alexander the Great. That’s right, too young to be disrespectful of his position of authority but an equal in spirit.

Without question, in the realm of accomplishment, our teacher towered over us all. My status was miniscule, a “gnat” comfortable to go unnoticed and merely drink in the elixir from on high, and wisdom was ever in evidence when Kirchner spoke.

Thoughts at times were strangely big and would arrive with the weight of previous journeys of the spirit, distillations like “The size of Tolstoy and Beckett is vastly different but the scope of their art is identical.” Wow! Where did that come from? At times, a hard-earned insight would surface and have little connection to the previous moment…seemingly. As a class, we would add “a touch stunned and impressed” with whatever else might come to mind, and occasionally that would be “whatever in the hell does that have to do with my precious creation.”

When our teacher did dig in to ferret out what was going on with us were the moments when I felt the greatest compassion for my classmates and found the neurotic narcissism of young composers a bit tedious. Some would view any and all words as a personal attack. Sometimes, any and all words did seem to be a ripping away of the ground you might be standing on, especially if political motivations were central to your artistic thinking. Justifying musical decisions by societal implications seemed to particularly goad our teacher into action. I guess Kirchner was merely answering the call to step forward from the sidelines to squash a perceived impertinence and arrogance, especially if the moment held no musical interest for him. Empty gestures and rhetoric could try his patience if he felt no impetus of the spirit lying beneath the musical motions, or at least, some connection to the progression of sound, whether or not it was adding up to anything of interest to him personally. A disconnect with your own art was when boredom or brutality would emerge from our emperor.

Admittedly, my world wasn’t particularly social. I lived in an apartment in Medford, Mass where my wife was the assistant band director at Medford High with a distinctly southern drawl from our Tennessee origins. I discovered what cold can do on the daily wait to catch the bus into Harvard and the trudge to the Music Building and eventual journey back to Junior. In 1969, soon after I received my admission to Harvard’s graduate program, I also received my orders to report for my induction physical into the Army. Fortunately for me, I seemed to say all the right things at my Army physical. When they said, “Take off your glasses and look into the box. What do you see?” My response, “Nothing.” Then “Now, what do you see?” . . . “A big black dot.” Correctible eyesight doesn’t keep you from combat, and the Army’s specialist for the eyesight-challenged never asked me any questions but only flashed lights and moved lens in front of my eyes. Finally, near the end of my trip to the specialist, he walked toward me with a card from across the room and said, “Tell me what’s on the card as soon as you can.” Once he was about 7 or 8 feet away, I said, “It’s a face.” That answer and the thought of me with a gun talked some sense into the government stance on my status, not 4-F and written off as useless but 1-Y, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.” I saluted the American flag which fully occupied one wall of the optometrist office and began my preparations to take my family to Canada . . . . (Yep, only kidding…sorta). Two weeks later I got my new enlistment status and realized I wasn’t going to have to flush my Harvard future and start acquiring a taste for Vietnamese food. Yah, the bitter cold from Medford wasn’t so bad considering.

Of my classmates in Kirchner’s seminar, I was probably the youngest. Turns out in 1969 that John Adams was the first Harvard student composer allowed to write a musical composition as his senior honors thesis.There may have been one other composer who was an underclassman, Leonard Lerhman. He seemed to have a connection to one of the “houses.” Maybe Dunster House was putting together a “musical” that he was creating. My memory was an adoration of “Marc Blitzstein” in the Lerhman mental mythology. Kirchner never seemed amused, and Leonard defended his ways by digging himself in deeper. Many a moment in our weekly two-hour composition seminar reached the edge of decorum by their interaction. Possibly, an accumulated history was in evidence. I’m sure all of us emerged unscathed but under the radar did seem quite comfortable at times.

Leon Kirchner took over the position previously held by Walter Piston in the pantheon of Harvard’s musical world. Piston had performed his duties well and brought the University the proper acclaim expected of a Harvard professor. He certainly was outstandingly productive as a composter having both cultural “hits” like The Incredible Flutist along with esteemed symphonic and chamber works of solid craftsmanship. Piston also was synonymous with the learning of Music Theory in America during his tenure. In 1960, more schools were using the Piston theory texts than any other. Turns out that those are intimidating shoes to fill, the “Bigelow” Chair indeed. Kirchner’s arrival at Harvard in 1961 at a youthful 42 carried with it an inappropriate weight in the world of American music. At this point and possibly for the duration, the appointment to the Walter Bigelow Rosen chair was an anointing. There were a dozen positions in American music that garnered the attention of the entire musical culture. Leon Kirchner, long, lean, brilliant, …both authoritative and searching was seated as a guide to aesthetic development in a period of music sputtering on the fumes of the 20th century’s obsession with innovative energy. The impetus of artistic explorations now found a justification for most any pursuit, no matter how extreme or disconnected from self, much less the grand humanity as a whole. Leon did his best in unruly times. He tried to be open to the totality of cultural development, but his aesthetic was hard-earned and fragile, even if his spirit was expansive and inquisitive. His connection to other voices was burdensome. For one who orbited and nurtured his private expressive need, he wished for connection yet was isolated by his position and the floundering of his charges. His only model to fall back on was a “doozie.” Kirchner’s memory of those days was a “putting of all of us in our place.”
Arnold Schoenberg as a teacher has a nigh unrivaled sphere of influence. Many of course rightly point to Nadia Boulanger as the incubator of compositional talent in the first half of the 20th century. Admittedly, there’s a strong case for her solfege, counterpoint, and intuition methods, but Schoenberg’s Alban Berg and Anton Webern also led to our Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim. Let the musical gods be appeased. Kirchner’s memories of Schoenberg were centered in his teacher’s impressive technique, a contrapuntal genius that could seemingly solve any contrapuntal conundrum in a stylistically appropriate way…. a man, who with chalk and a blackboard could circumvent the thorniest impasse of contrapuntal construction. If seemingly painted into a corner, Schoenberg simply showed the walls were hiding a door of continuation or closure as needed. The musical discourse seemed to remain intact with his next move. To his students, I’m sure this was “drop-dead” impressive. I imagine Webern’s intense scrutiny of Heinrich Isaac’s contrapuntal machinations of the Renaissance would find a home next to Schoenberg’s contrapuntal command. In such uncharted territories as the early 20th century, it must have been reassuring to sit next to such fearless assurance and philosophic imperative. Music was headed forward with a compass and rudder held by a captain of steely resolution. By the time Kirchner encounters Schoenberg, I’m sure the aura of ominous authority surrounded him. Captain Ahab could not have been more determined to our young Kirchner and Kim.

So Kirchner came to Harvard in 1961 and quickly figured out he was never going to write a Harmonielehre like his predecessor Piston or teacher Schoenberg. His initial gift to Harvard’s Music Department was the organization and implementation of a Ph.D. program in composition. I’m sure to the scholarly tradition the idea of writing, a piece of music to earn a Master’s degree much less a Doctorate had to seem like the “watering down” rather than the expansion of the program. The Ph.D. program in composition was launched in 1967 and possibly grew out of Kirchner’s composition seminar that contained Ivan Tcherepnin, Reese Scot, Richard St. Clair, Tyson Street, and a young undergraduate Robert Levin and soon I assume John Adams. To start the Ph.D. curriculum, Kirchner looked to his old classmate from his days at U.C.L.A. with Schoenberg and tapped Earl Kim to leave Princeton for this new initiative at Harvard. Earl Kim would be in charge of the Form and Analysis course that would be the mainstay of study in the graduate program as well as have his own composition seminar. I didn’t know anything of Kim and his music when I arrived and would leave utterly changed by both the man and his music.

Kim told this story about Arnold Schoenberg. After handing back some theory or counterpoint assignment to his students, Schoenberg walked over and picked up a pencil and began sharpening it in a mechanical pencil sharpener. As he finished, he walked over to the desk in front of the class and held the pencil up until he had everyone’s attention. He then smashed it down on the desk with brutal force. Enveloped in a shattering silence, he looked up and asked the class, “Why would I sharpen it, only to immediately flatten it?” Point taken and shoved quite deeply into the consciousness of every student in the room. Yes, Schoenberg must have been “ominously impressive,” as Kirchner would say.

Luise Vosgerchian was in charge of the undergraduate theory courses and everyone had their opportunity to become proficient in the realization of figured bass or at least be able to voice-lead any harmonic progression correctly with an occasional musical decision thrown in for good measure. She also administered the keyboard entrance exam to the graduate program in composition. I recall looking at an open score of Bach’s Art of Fugue with four staves of which three of the four, were moveable “C” clefs. That’s right. From bottom to top: a bass clef, tenor clef, alto clef, and soprano clef. After stumbling about for 30 to 45 seconds, she said “That’s enough. Seems like you have some work to do.” Mission accomplished I assume. I hope there was one of us who impressed her, but I doubt it.

The big entrance exams were taken after we received our admission to the program and as I recall was at least 6 hours of exams in multiple sections. There was a 4-part chorale setting, a two-part invention to be created from a given motive, an analysis of Chopin’s e minor Prelude, followed by a general music history exam that had about a 100 objective questions from the Medieval period forward and a couple of broad essay questions. I hope I had at least an hour and a half to write the two-part invention. Both unfortunately and fortunately, I passed everything so I didn’t need to take any extra “remedial” classes. I was luckily primed to write the invention, since I had just finished writing one for my undergraduate counterpoint course at the University of Tennessee. I played every card in my deck: ascending and descending sequences, a pedal point that pushed the limits of expansion, and a theme with stretto possibilities. Great, but at Harvard David Del Tredici was teaching the Counterpoint class, and I sensed that I was missing out, especially in his discussion of harmonic progression and the balancing of tonal regions. Listening at the periphery, I did begin to pump some classmates as to what exactly was going on in there. Counterpoint and Del Tredici’s mind could have been fun.
Let’s return to the Kirchner seminar of 1969. The eldest member of our class was Jack Behrens. I imagine he already had a master’s degree from somewhere else and seemed to be at ease with his stork-like self, slightly taller and thinner than Kirchner. He was working on a piece for orchestra that had a children’s theme as its inspiration, a modern day Peter and the Wolf. Jack also was married and invited my wife, child, and I for a dinner at their Cambridge apartment. He and his wife Sonja were atightly wound couple compared to Bobby Jo and myself. Sonja was a pianist and Bobby Jo was a flutist, but as band director of Medford High School, my wife was assuredly going insane and could not take advantage of some therapeutic music-making.

Jack Behrens would later take a position on the music faculty at the newly formed Cal State campus in Bakersfield, California. He remained there for four or five years before returning to his native Canada and ended up the head of a prestigious music school. I eventually would be the chair of the Cal State Bakersfield music program he left in the late 70’s. I arrived in 1982 and had no idea of Jack’s earlier tenure at the same school.

Let’s try to make quick work of the rest of my class of ‘69 composers. There was the articulate Joel Kabokov who I believe also landed in California and seemed to be in a national spotlight as the teacher of a young prodigy, at least his name emerged with a quote or two. (In a Google, I just read Joel’s remembrance of Kirchner, Wow!) Michael Riesmann seemed to be finishing up or away and connected eventually with the Philip Glass group as a conductor. Garby Leon carried the mantle of California “hippie” and sported a looseness that even I admired. (Garby now owns a chunk of American consciousness as a Hollywood story analyst and developer.) Max Lifchitz was the first person from Mexico I had ever met. I remember listening to some most energetic brass works that would have made Carlos Chavez proud. He unfortunately became a victim of a young graduate program’s reassessment, a fact that to this day is painful. His revenge gained a measure of completion when his old teacher Leon Kirchner contacted him about the possible performance in Max’s “North-South Consonance” concert series that has made Max Lifchitz a central figure in our peripheral scene. He had some piano chops to go with the lasting goad he received from the Harvard graduate program.

According to Fred Lerdahl, another Harvard professor who would arrive for his assistant professor years before heading out to Michigan and then Columbia, my classmate Doug McG… was entirely in his brain, whereas I was entirely in my body. I remember my alter-Doug as one who produced constructions that Milton Babbitt might admire. (Forgive my lack of memory.) That’s in my mind’s eye, but I can’t conjure up his sound world. I do remember him saying that he only practiced the hardest passages in the piano literature, figuring if he could handle those moments the rest would easily yield to his will. Impressive, but I really like the slow and easy moments. Yes, … I can play them.

I should mention the one grad student who probably, had the biggest impact on the Harvard graduate program and that would be Faye-Ellen Silverman. I figure that Faye was just as accomplished a composer as the rest of us. All I know was eight of the ten graduate composers who started with me in 1969 were given a terminal Masters degree at the end of their second year of study. Faye transformed the graduate program at Harvard by suing them. I’m sure that case was settled out-of-court and probably paid for Faye’s continued graduate studies somewhere else.

Of course, I have just stomped through the Kirchner seminar only. I did leave out a young Argentinean whose manuscript was exquisitely beautiful and wrote serial works of great complexity that unfortunately he didn’t seem to have any connection to, beautiful visual documents of disembodied sound. Any ability to perform such works would have been a stunner.

Although married and living in Medford for my first year, I did develop a close friendship with Michael Friedmann who was in Earl Kim’s composition seminar. Michael had the most impressive knowledge of the literature of any of my peers. He seemed to know Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler as well as anyone I had ever met, before or since. He was just as impressive to me as Schoenberg was to Kirchner, and besides, Michael was a lot of fun to be around. For my first two years at Harvard, Michael and I seemingly had lunch together every day. I got the biggest kick from Michael’s decision making process. Options were weighed and when a decision was made, it carried the full force of his considerable personality. (Michael is our academic star at Yale and always a performer of the greatest expressivity and intelligence.)

If I just stick to my first year and Leon Kirchner’s composition seminar, then I must mention one final encounter. First, it starts with the Harvard undergraduate student who gave my first year a tremendous boost of joy and that is John Dearth. I often would find myself in the basement of the music building in the morning before my classes, seated at a piano trying to unleash the music. Three years earlier as a freshman at the University of Tennessee, I had to face up to the fact that I had chosen to start my undergraduate study as a music major, and although piano was my second instrument and saxophone my first, I was going to need to gain proficiency at the piano to be a composer or take the more sensible road to any other major. Having played my own piano composition and Schumann’s “Soaring” from the Fantaisestucke in mimicry of my quite gifted mother, I had been placed in the piano studio of Professor William Dorn who quickly realized I did not know the fingering of a C major scale and yet assigned for first nine weeks of study a Bach Invention, a Haydn Sonata, and Preludes by Alberto Ginastera. My life became the practice room and to save myself from yet another moment of frustration, I began to improvise at the piano to blow off steam and found that creating an entire world of music in some form of spontaneous combustion was of primal interest to me. The Bach became fugues, the Haydn became Beethoven, Brahms led to Prokofiev, Debussy led to Sessions and suddenly the landscape of my improvisations became central. Music got written, but the enticing piano world absorbed me. John Dearth found me in the basement of the Harvard Music building and pulled out his trumpet and began moving inside my world with such assurance and power that it was clear to both of us that we would make a daily trek to the basement to renew our dance of creation. Even outside the practice room, the feeling of connection to John was equivalent to a mind-meld on Star Trek. Our rhythm moved ever forward in continuous support, catching accents, nuances, and moods. John grew up in a community close to Boston and when he asked if I would join him in a feast, I was happy to head to his home woods. We journeyed through the forest until we arrived at an enormous stone quarry that was now filled with water about 100 feet below our perch. From this precipice, we as young lads picked up a few stones to toss far over the cliff and watch them land in the pool of water below. One heave would lead to another until the moment when my mighty launch sent both the stone and my glasses hurtling over the sheer drop to the water that I no longer could see with any clarity. Well,…strikingly dumb. My eyesight which had kept me from a journey to Vietnam would now have me tucked away in a near-sighted haze, a bubble in which no face at four feet has features and at ten feet only instinct and intuition could guide. Time to go to class.

As I made my way from Harvard Square to the Music Building on that beautiful spring day, I had grown accustomed to the haze of my new world. Out-of-focus seemed just fine for a while. I easily found the Music Building exactly where I suspected and when I entered the building, I received a hearty welcome from Tillman Merritt who I had never met during my first year of study but was busy about an introduction when the individual beside him spoke. I immediately recognized that voice. It was Leonard Bernstein. Yes, my mother made me watch all those Sunday afternoon TV shows in the late 50’s. I knew that melodious voice. Somewhere I heard that Harvard had two “summa cum laude” majors in music, Leonard Bernstein and Leroy Anderson. Yah, I didn’t believe that either. I still tried to act like any adolescent Alexander the Great, whether I could see or not. I’m sure in the ancient world I would be left back with the women to sew rather than join the big boys in battle. Extremely near-sighted has its limits. Leonard Bernstein was simply in search of a composition student, and I turned up.

Well, let’s face it. All of this is terribly impressive. Leon Kirchner’s my composition teacher and Leonard Bernstein wants to hang out and talk.

We headed outside into that beautiful, fuzzy day, and he asked me about my life and interests and learned of my family and the small town of Clinton, Tennessee. He learned of my parent’s role in the South’s transition from segregation to integration, the fact that Clinton, Tennessee was the first school to have court-ordered integration after the Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education in 1954, how my mother had spoken on Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” show on CBS for an amazing three minutes about of the courage of the black children facing persecution to get an education, and how my Dad and a Baptist minister had led the black students through a gauntlet of racists that had descended on our small, Southern town to try to disrupt the beginnings of integration in this country. I, of course, explained I was only 8 years old, but found the cross burning in a front yard quite memorable. He told me about going to the Curtis Institute after Harvard, which I guess contained a heavy dose of sight reading scores. I didn’t tell him about my encounter with the Art of Fugue. He asked if I had a desire to write the big piece for orchestra. At this point, I should have said, “You betcha.” Instead I told him, I had written a couple works for orchestra but was presently working on a “big” piano piece. He insisted, “But is it your dream to write the “big” orchestra piece. Blew it again and said, “Well, we’ll see what’s next after I finish this.” He asked about my piano study, and I told him that I started late and developed a taste for improvisation. I told him that I ended up playing with a bunch of jazz musicians in Knoxville, and they helped me get through the gigs and showed the basic building blocks of that language. Mostly, I wrote the music we would play so I could get to the improvisation section.

So, after about an hour and a half seated on steps at various buildings around the music building, I had told Leonard Bernstein more about myself and my life than practically anyone except now, you.

Bernstein was actually on an official visit to the campus to give the music department his feedback and assessment of the program. Hope he didn’t make a written report since I’m just getting to the good part. So as we start toward the Music Building, I explain that I have a class and he said he would like to join me. I pray that we didn’t arrive late to Kirchner’s Composition Seminar. My “gnat” status in the class would be harder to maintain if I made an entrance with Leonard Bernstein. He does have a way of garnering attention and among young, composer pups there very well could be an accident from the desire to say hello and otherwise. If we arrived early for class, then I could easily take my proper place on the periphery.

The piano piece I had been working on was entitled “Stones” which, of course in 1969 and given my connection to jazz musicians, probably implied a bit of musical psychedelics was in-store. Although both young and crazy, I’m sure I didn’t want Kirchner to call on me to play my piece for our guest. No such luck. I remember being flanked by both Bernstein and Kirchner peering at my manuscript as I performed. Of course, with my eyesight I couldn’t see a thing. It’s a bit hard to explain this piano piece, written for no piano virtuoso but requiring many moves that are as fast as our species gets about. For some reason, I had moved from a Hindemith and Bartokian world of counterpoint and chromaticism and landed in the middle of “method acting” as if a most dissonant language was my psychological terra firma. As Lukas Foss said the next year after Kirchner had left to work on his opera, “Well, you’ll not be able to write that piece again.” So “Stones” was intensely real and cathartic. It alternated between eruption, exhaustion, and frenzy. There is one moment where the music moves from its nothingness and begins to spasmodically, yet maniacally vibrate until it arrives at a point where I literally am moving as fast as I can, as long as I can, with every note chiseled in rhythmic precision and dynamic flux. When I say exhaustion, I’m not kidding. The work weaves its web and works its way to a close. At this point in its composition, twelve minutes have elapsed, and I reach the end of the third movement, and I’m admittedly cranked up. To be beyond performance is a very euphoric moment for me. When dealing with a precisely notated music, I feel an overwhelming sense of pressure to perform it perfectly. Extremes of performance like this piece always leave me giddy with relief that it’s in my past.

(As Adele says, give me a pair of scissors and then watch the impossible quest for perfection begin. She claims there was some basic instruction left out of my first grade experience. I’m sure what didn’t get left out walked away, and yet…I continue. Education is a long road.)

Back to the Somerville and Medford side of the music building on a beautiful and memorable spring day. As my piano performance came to a close and as I sat in the middle of my puddle of euphoria, I’m sure Leon was quite curious as what Leonard might say. Bernstein leaned over and flipped back a few pages arriving at a dark sea of notes, “What a most extraordinary page of manuscript.” We were staring at my “as fast as I can, as long as I can” page where both hands are notated on a single line in an alternating-hand stream of 32nd notes, shaped by dynamics, and interrupted occasionally with triplets and sixteenths, ever accompanied by multi-pitched, grace-note attacks creating a two-fisted punch or two of reprieve that would fall back into frenzy. Mr. Euphoria responded, “I wanted to see how long I could sustain it….When I nail the previous page, it feels like I ‘arrive’ at this launch point.”

Mr. Bernstein: “Well, it certainly has an impact. We discussed your jazz piano background, but I don’t hear any jazz influences.”

Mr. Cranked-up Crazy: “Oh, I love jazz too much to try to mimic it,” still barreling forward in the aftermath. Was that a “glint” from my teacher?

Bernstein responds, “But jazz improvisation seemed to be such a central focus in your development…”

Mr. Crash and Burn does Stand-Up: “Well, as you know I’m from East Tennessee. You’re possibly unaware of the latest developments in East Tennessee jazz.” (Some attempts at humor fail. Depending on the timing and situation, a room can be filled with palpable embarrassment. The need for forgiveness will be discussed later.)

My memorable day with Leonard Bernstein ended with me a drench with adrenaline, my new friend sputtering to a response, and my teacher Leon Kirchner saving us all by stepping forward to thank our esteemed guest and participating composers and dismissing the class.

My friend Michael Friedmann was there as a witness and we together stepped into the hallway to make our exit from the building, and he said, “That was astounding?...Unbelievable! Did that really happen?” My post-performance daze would have become tunnel vision if I could see beyond the three-foot bubble around my head. I’m sure my classmates were a buzz with memories of their encounter with Leonard, and I would love to know the exchange of comments between Kirchner and Bernstein once we all had left the room. Michael continued as we left the building. “You do know who you were talking to?

“Yes.”

“I mean…Unbelievable. Of all composers to…”

“I know. I know…I just had a listening test that included his ‘Age of Anxiety’ Symphony no. 2, and its got plenty of jazzy piano writing,” besides the fact that everyone in America was aware of West Side Story and its direct connection to the heart of American music.

Awash in the aftermath and crashing from an intense dose of adrenaline, I soared over the peak moment of my young, compositional life. Yes, there was a sense of descent that found some solace in the memory of a perfectly shaped performance but whose momentum was clearly moving in a single downward direction. Michael, hair and mind ablaze, wished me well as I made my way home to Medford and the antidote for the self-absorbed, my one and a half year old Junior.

Enough of telling tales, Kirchner rightly assessed I might be troublesome company at his summer retreat to the Marlboro Music Festival. In the month that followed before our student composers’ concert, I added two more “Stones” to my piano work, and performed it as a 5-movement composition. It ends with reiterated shards of self, disappearing into a vast calm and quiet, psychological dust, the only remnant of the earlier debris of intense connection. Afterward, at Kirchner’s home, I again was euphorically awash in relief. Years later, I would reconnect with Kirchner and he would recall his thought that I was the most violent person he had ever met. I commented that I was simply being led by the nose through a physical dance of sound. Neither of us mentioned that being dragged by the balls was a more apt description. Kirchner commented, “It was your best year at Harvard,” and I remembered how much I loved getting home to Junior. Maybe he was right.

In my fifth and final year at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein, would return to give the 1973 Norton Lectures, and I was asked to join a discussion group that would gather with Bernstein a few days after each lecture to mull over the implications and insights. The Harvard music faculty representative at these gatherings was Fred Lerdahl, and Bernstein’s Norton Lectures would subsequently inspire Lerdahl to continue thinking about the connection of music and linguistics. I believe Ray Jackendoff, the co-author with Lerdahl of Musical Linguistics, was also in the Bernstein discussion group. There were enormous minds from both MIT and Harvard in the group. At least 12 different academic disciplines were represented, including Math and Physics along with the arts and humanities. My function was to sit quietly in full absorption and beam. After completing my doctoral exams, I had entered my “radiant phase,”… not very productive but seemingly perfectly sufficient to all circumstances. I eventually would surface to prepare an ark of escape, just in case it was needed. So, at my second encounter with Leonard Bernstein, he found himself as “Prophet” at the closing quarter of “the century of death” and I was playing Noah in case things got worse. As for the discussion group, when very large minds speak, quietly listening seems most sensible. I remember words falling out of a Mathematics Professor that appeared to emanate from a space as large as all-consciousness or, at least, having a clear galactic grip. On a break at one of our gatherings, I stood beside Leonard, at an adjacent urinal, and with both of us staring straight ahead, he said, “Whatever you’re on, …I want some.” I assured him he already had what I was “holding.” Thus, we gave it a shake and zipped it back up and returned to the discussion. I guess my glow of the moment appeared to be chemically enhanced, a point of view of which I was certainly aware, but don’t imagine that I was hallucinating my way through the day. Possibly, the influence of my jazz background had its effect after all. At least, this time Mr. Bernstein could clearly see the connection. (More later, when talk of Fred and Earl can proceed in earnest.)

For Leon Kirchner, there is a happy ending. The great effort of his opera “Lily” behind him, he resumed his place and continued. Without the desired triumph of international renown to bolster him, he reinvented his relationship to students and the Harvard community. I spent but a year in his composition seminar before the struggle of “Lily’s” birth pulled him away, but already the seed of his salvation had been planted….the initiative of a Chamber Music seminar in performance and analysis. In the world of music making, Kirchner could interact with insights and delight, joining his youthful charges to penetrate music’s interior world. The sheer humanity of music making became his center and connection to others. Performers had always been a part of his summer endeavors at the Marlboro Festival where a young Peter Serkin learned of Leon’s respect for Takemitsu. Now at Harvard, Lynn Chang, Joel Fan, and Yo Yo Ma would all become lifelong champions of Kirchner’s music and would lend their memories at his memorial.

In 1975, Kirchner would start the Harvard Chamber Orchestra that became a most important addition to the lives of all those who participated in it. The concerts became major events and gave the larger Harvard community an opportunity to share in Leon’s most expansive and inclusive self. There was an exhilaration in his presence that would draw many members of his orchestra to Harvard’s Paine Concert Hall for a moment of remembrance in 2010, twenty years after Leon Kirchner had stepped away from his duties at Harvard University. I, too, had chosen to return for this moment of remembrance. His compositions from the Duo of 1947 to “The Forbidden” of 2006 were featured. I was completely enthralled by “Interlude II” (2003) and recognized the rhapsodic abandon, unbridled expressivity that contained moments of the most tender intimacy and resolution. Performers whose lives he touched had gathered in his honor. Colleagues remembered his boundless interests and enthusiasm, his brilliant, complex, and tumultuous mind. At least 50 in the hall were connected to the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. I was happy for my teacher. He fittingly had found the connection with others through the performance of music. This gathering of remembrance ended with a taped performance of Bruckner’s “Adagio” from Symphony No. 7 played by the Harvard Chamber Orchestra with our Leon conducting.

Kirchner’s complex life had found its appreciative audience. I was honored to be a witness.

For additional information, and for rights/reproduction and research on Kirchner material, please contact the New York Public Library, which houses the Kirchner papers and letters.

                 
Kirchner Exits Newton’s Room  

-- Joel Kabakov

Born into a universe where it could be determined how a particle of music might behave in a harmonic field as it traveled ever outward from its Ptolemaic root, in an age when the advent of Schonberg would cast doubt upon that cosmology and rewrite the mechanics of sonority just as Einstein and Hauer were doing in their respective cosmologies; indeed born into that time, Leon Kirchner was to become the traveler between two worlds. Bernstein knew that Leon could have been Benny Goodman’s pianist just like Bud and Mel Powell; that he could have made killing after killing on Broadway or followed  Leroy Anderson’s trail of sand paper or traded cinematic gestures with Leonard Rosenman in Hollywood. He also knew that it was time to break out of the circle of fifths.

Was it coincidence that the twelve tone/atonal paradigm co-evolved with quantum mechanics and relativity? What did science have to do with chord changes? Everything. The old tonal archetypes, the perfect and imperfect consonances, the sacred leading tones were ferociously standing their ground as Arnold and his disciples evolved the musical ear itself with the latent force of the complete chromatic. And in the immediate generation following Schoenberg we see the serial methodology taking up residence in the intuition of composers as atonality no longer depends on strict hexachords. The assertion that there is no such thing as atonality is true only to the extent that every note of music is referential in some sense to what has gone before, every gesture evokes its arcane progenitor.

When he discovered that for every action, for every preparatory gesture in composition there were myriad rejoinders; the inner voice taking over, the decorative molding collapsing the wall, and that—by the way—Mozart and Beethoven were on to something that broke all the rules of Newtonian mechanics, Kirchner scaled that greater carapace that high music always seeks. For what had been the leading voice might at any moment sink into oblivion at the hands of a fragmentary ostinato, beginnings showing up too late, endings uninvited, not for lack of formal decorum but for a profound questioning of artistic and philosophic protocol which great music simultaneously reveres and abjures.

And with whom might Leon talk about such things? I can assure you that some who found themselves walking at fast pace beside Kirchner in Harvard Yard, fresh out of their freshman year or armed with post conservatory violin case, got the full indiscriminate dose of cosmology as if they were a Glenn Gould or a Malcolm Frager. I was tested thus as an incoming bundle of post-Cal State insecurity and I’ll be damned if I didn’t pass that test. It helped to be a dogged misfit who had hung out at Venice West beatnik coffee shops while still in high school in L.A., listening to western civilization being deconstructed intellectually, culturally by the likes of Ferlinghetti and Kerouac. It’s all about just how classicism connives to stay alive as its trappings are appropriated by every Tom, Dick, and Harry, each training his binoculars on a square inch of the infinite cosmos.

It was on just one of those cardio masculine walks that Kirchner popped me the question, “do you think you’d like to help me organize and teach the new Performance Analysis Seminar this fall?” Well, the Xerox machine thank god having  been invented allowed me to duplicate colonnades of scores as handouts behind which I could blurt out some remarks to the chamber players during class only to hear Kirchner’s remarks in turn about my remarks on the walk home or over beers.

I remember one night in class vociferating about Prokofiev’s flute sonata alternately arranged for violin—and piano—that it works well to play every beat of the first movement “as a series of downbeats, no anacrusis or weak beats,” to which Kirchner later corrected me not in the relevance of my remarks but “not for that audience…maybe for a Malcolm Frager or a musician of that order.”

Well, what about Jamie Buswell, Yu Shen Ma, Philip Aaberg, Lisa Goldman, Seth Carlin, Garby Leon, Lynn Chang, Ronan Lefkowitz? Too young? Or was I, at twenty-five, too young to make the remark? Malcolm indeed.

We all sat like the bodies at rest that remained at rest in Kirchner’s composition seminar shuffling little shreds of score that one by one would be defended at the piano. Actually Leon was very astute and objective, not coddling or smarmy in his critiques. It was to the students who so desired his benedictions that any negativity was misconstrued as doom. It was the students being dutifully Newtonian in a quarky space.

Even Leonard Bernstein wanted Leon’s approval as he patrolled back and forth in front of the steps where Leon was sitting one afternoon during a break in the Norton Lectures. Looking at me suddenly, the leading figure in North American music said “That is Leon Kirchner” in a tone reminiscent of Walter Cronkite bringing all wars to an end. And true, Leon was one of the few who rarefied his praise of Lenny save for the two-martini admission that Bernstein was the “the greatest talent.” Coming from a Schoenberg exponent who had been systematically taught to hate all things vernacular and Broadway, such a remark manifested his uncanny awareness of underlying deep structures in art whether they masqueraded as cabaret songs or Schubert Lieder.

My Graduate Prize Fellowship at Harvard in the early seventies came with a teaching gig or two. The one with Kirchner of course, and also one with Elliot Forbes in tonal counterpoint, and yet another across the Charles as chair of composition at The Boston Conservatory of Music. It was at BCM that I did some empirical studies on the aural structures of atonality, a particularly dramatic one being the simple playing of the complete chromatic in random order on the piano wherein after the eleventh note was sounded I asked the students to vote for the “sweetest twelfth note” out of four or five played, all but one having been heard somewhere in the series. Needless to say the chromatic itself longed for completion just as the leading tone seeks the tonic in tonal music. This phenomenon has little or nothing to do with absolute pitch. But for us it meant we were all at home in zero gravity.

Thank you Isaac. Thank you Albert. Thank you Leon.

Joel Kabakov
PhD ’77 GSAS
Thesis: a composition “El Jaleo” ballet suite for orchestra