Great Lakes festival features a composer whose music spans an entire era.
Diana Lieberman
Special to the Jewish News
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ne of the pleasures of the Great
Lakes Chamber Music Festival,
which begins its 14th season on
Saturday, June 9, is the chance to explore
in depth the music of leading contempo-
rary composers, juxtaposed with works by
a major figure from the past.
This year, the festival honors Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer Leon Kirchner.
Kirchner, who was born in 1919, will be
on hand to coach performers and to speak
with festival supporters.
He shares the limelight with a com-
poser who was born too early to receive
the Pulitzer or any of the other prizes by
which modern composers are so frequent-
ly measured — Ludwig van Beethoven.
In a letter to festival patrons, artistic
director James Tocco said there was no
single unifying theme that binds the two
composers, "except perhaps the aesthetic
search for that which is noble and sublime
in the music they createcr
Although Kirchner does not put himself
on the same plane as Beethoven, he does
see a degree or two of similarity between
himself and the classical superstar. First,
he shares with Beethoven a well-docu-
mented "inestimable regard for Hander
Secondly, "although Beethoven was
poorly educated in arithmetic or math-
ematics, he had a massive and almost
unequalled command of musical architec-
ture," Kirchner said. " [Arnold] Schoenberg
called this 'gestalt, which he defined as
form-making ability. I, in some small
degree, am equally obsessed with gestalt','
he said.
"But what an honor even to be paired
with this giant, who must have come from
some other planet!"
Brooklyn Boy
Kirchner himself came from Brooklyn.
Along with his parents, who were Russian-
Jewish immigrants, he moved to Los
Angeles as a young boy. A gifted pianist,
he began at the University of California at
Berkeley as a zoology major, heading for a
medical degree.
Instead, he dedicated himself to music,
studying music theory with Schoenberg,
then a professor at Berkeley. Other teach-
ers included Roger Sessions and Ernest
Bloch.
As a composer, Kirchner's spare but
emotional work has drawn international
praise, numerous prestigious commissions
and awards, including the Prix de Paris,
the Naumberg Award and the Friedheim
Award.
His music "erupts with emotional force
and is all marked by a pervading aesthetic
of tonal beauty,' Tocco said in a recent e-
mail interview. "Audiences who experience
Leon Kirchner's music can expect to hear
works of rare power and poetry, wonder-
fully expressive and uninhibited."
Along with Kirchner's instrumental
music, to be featured at seven of the
Great Lakes festival concerts, he also
has composed numerous vocal works,
including the opera Lily, based on Saul
Bellow's novel Henderson, the Rain King.
In 1996, the Boston Symphony premiered
Of Things Exactly as They Are, scored for
orchestra, chorus and soloists. Among his
future projects, he is considering writing a
small opera" based on one of the stories
of Sholem Aleichem or I.L. Peretz.
Although the ethic behind his music has
remained constant, Kirchner said he has
considered experimenting with a more
tonal style.
"During my student days',' he said, "I
had the privilege of studying theory with
Arnold Schoenberg, who was one of the
great masters of the structure and func-
tion of theory in the music of the 18th
and 19th centuries, in its process in the
works of Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Bach,
etc. And yet he was the master of 12-tone
music.
"Despite this fact, he stated that one can
still compose a masterpiece in C. It was a
seductive idea, one that I have been pursu-
ing of late, possibly to reveal the necessary
intimacies between the past and present
that keep the art of music alive and well."
"
Going Electronic
As a professor at the University of
Southern California in Los Angeles, Mills
College in Oakland, Calif., and — for more
than 25 years — at Harvard University
in Cambridge, Mass., Kirchner became
a major influence on many of today's
younger conductors and performers.
This influence flowed in both directions.
In 1966, Kirchner was drawn into elec-
tronic music by one of his most talented
students, leading directly to the creation of
one of Kirchner's most important works,
the String Quartet No. 3.
Forty years later, the composer remem-
bers the genesis of the work:
"At Harvard I had a group of brilliant
students:' he said. "Among them was Ivan
Tcherepnin, who had in the previous sum-
mer worked in the Toronto Electronic Lab
and came to my composition seminar
with a tape he had done there.
"This was the first time a tape had
been brought to the class, although many
younger composers had been venturing
away from traditional instrumentation.
"It was enough for me to think — either
of retirement or learning something about
electronic music:' Kirchner said.
He called a former student, Morton
Subotnick. Subotnick, a pioneer in elec-
tronic music, was at the time teaching at
New York University.
In Kirchner's words: "I asked him if
he had learned something about music
from me. He was — and always has been
— generous in his appraisal.
"'Well then, you must accept me as a
student. I'm going to be working on a
Leon Kirchner on page 54
May 31 • 2007
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