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This week was the 50th anniversary of Stravinsky’s death. For a long time now, I have often thought to myself, “why do I so rarely hear Stravinsky’s music on the radio anymore.” Of course, with this anniversary, his music was back on the radio – but for how long? Just for the week? When I was a young music student, Stravinsky as a composer was in the pantheon of the composing gods! What a master! What made his work fall, to a large extent, out of favor?

At least in my own mind, I have always thought of Stravinsky as the musical equivalent of Picasso. Yes, they remain associated with one another because of their work together, but beyond that, Stravinsky, as was Picasso, was an artistic chameleon over the course of his career. Listening to his entire body of work, he transforms himself, much in the way that Picasso did, going through different “periods” – always exploring, always re-inventing himself.

There are many great artists of the same period whose work I love, but whose entire body of work is of a whole. Miro, Dubuffet, Mondrian are examples – they invented their own language and explored every nook and cranny of that world – but still, as delightful as is their art, they were one trick ponies. Not so, Picasso, and certainly not so, Stravinsky. If one did not already know Stravinsky’s body of work, and were listening to his music from different periods, one could hardly conclude you were listening to the same composer.

And such inventiveness! He covers the gamut – minimalist, classicist, modernist, romantic, impressionist, serialist. And when I tune into New Sounds on occasion, it is hard to imagine much of what I hear there being composed without Stravinsky paving the way – whether they know it or not!

During the fall of 2020, while in the midst of listening to hundreds of albums that had been submitted for consideration for a Grammy award, I had the great pleasure of discovering the music of composer Kenneth Fuchs. That led, at some point, to our having a Zoom conversation, and to our staying in touch via social media and an occasional email – and also, to my listening to his other albums. I took an instant liking to his work – passionate, filled with beauty, and laid out with that beautiful logic of ideas that, when I hear it, I love so much about music.

In a reply to a recent Facebook post of mine in which I revealed my distaste for most, if not all, of the music that came out of the “experimental music” scene of the 1960s, Kenneth sent me a link to the liner notes to his most recent album, Point of Tranquility. In it, he described his path to becoming a composer – one very, very different from mine. This was a story of a young man who knew what he wanted from an early age, beginning with his high school music teacher, who laid the groundwork for him as a composer. Step by step, through college and beyond, he seems to have consciously taken steps to learn his craft and to connect with those who could help him achieve his goal.

I, on the other hand, have always acknowledged to myself that I was a “late bloomer.” I never did figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, instead, falling into an entirely accidental career. While always loving music, it wasn’t until my high school years that, under the tutelage of an inspiring piano teacher, I first became obsessed with playing piano and started practicing from four to ten hours a day – and cutting many a high school class in order to do just that in the practice room at my high school. Even my choice of high school indicates my cluelessness at the time. I loved music, but passed on attending Music and Art, and chose the Bronx High School of Science instead, thinking maybe I’d go into the sciences – only to later wind up playing piano all of the time. When it came time to select a college, I only applied to one – the Manhattan School of Music – much to the distress of my mother. I had no aspiration to actually become a professional musician and no clue how to go about doing that even if I wanted to, but just knew that I had no desire to study anything else other than music, and didn’t want to look at other colleges.

Starting at Manhattan in 1970, I really was clueless. I had no idea how limited my knowledge of music was, or what it took to become a musician. I just went to classes, soaked up everything that was being taught – but my piano lessons suffered right from the start as a result of an intense case of tendonitis from bad practicing habits. While I made progress, at some point the light dawned on me that the depth of understanding of music that I witnessed in the MSM faculty was not something I was going to achieve just from practicing the piano – and made the decision to switch from a piano to a music theory major.

That turned out to be a great decision for me. I loved studying theory – and spent the next years at MSM endlessly studying scores, analyzing music, and working my way through all of the albums in MSM’s vast music library. But, the end goal of all of that – I didn’t even give it a thought. I just enjoyed it immensely and worked hard at it, but without ever considering how I might actually earn a living at the end of it all. To earn money, I started giving private piano and theory lessons, worked for a number of years teaching theory at a local music school in the Bronx and also in MSM’s Preparatory Division – but all the while, knowing that I had no desire to continue doing that for the rest of my life. I have one distinct memory from that time, sitting in the cafeteria with other theory teachers at MSM during lunchtime, and thinking to myself, if I have to spend a lifetime doing this, I’ll shoot myself. A life spent discussing music as if it was the only thing in life that mattered, seemed utterly boring to me. I was looking for more.

Yet, after taking a few years break, during which I married and had a child, I went back to MSM for a Masters degree, again in music theory. That period of my life was a fog of craziness, as I juggled teaching, a new family, other part time jobs to make ends meet, and my studies – and somehow squeezing in writing a thesis on the songs of Charles Ives.

And, in and around all of that, I started to write music. Just a few small things here and there to start, but I had ideas in plenty – and my music theory studies provided the grounding knowledge I needed to proceed. I took private composition lessons with two teachers, Joseph Prostakoff and Ursula Mamlok, both of whom couldn’t care less about what music appealed to me, but were focused (fortunately for me) on simply teaching me a set of skills. With Joseph, I started at the beginning, writing simple modal melodies and simple counterpoint, and then gradually working my through music history, writing music in various styles. And despite it having no appeal for me whatsoever, somewhere along the way, I actually wrote 12-tone music, scores long since dispatched to the circular file.

Once my son was old enough to go off to school and during evenings was somewhat independent and could work on his homework and entertain himself, I started to write more. So, the real beginning of me writing regularly didn’t begin until the mid-1980s, by which time I already had a job outside of music that was very demanding of my time. That decision was made shortly after my son was born, recognizing that I couldn’t earn a satisfactory living as a music teacher (nor did I want to do that full-time), and needed to find something else to do with my life. That led to a quite accidental career, twenty-five years of which were spent at the NYC Transit Authority in various management positions, culminating in my becoming their VP for Contracts, a subject about which I had little knowledge prior to my starting in the job (someone thought I’d be good at it). In the years since, I often worked 12 or more hours every day, and then wrote music in whatever spare time was left, managing to write three or four pieces a year, during most years. My love for and interest in early music shaped much of what I was writing, applying compositional techniques that I gleaned from scores of the great composers of late medieval and Renaissance music – and gradually, I found my way to my own musical voice.

All these years of writing, I listened, of course, to new music – but often felt like I’d been born in the wrong time. During the ’80s and ’90s, I would become involved with various groups of composers, most of whom were writing 12-tone compositions, which were still the rage in colleges, and felt like a lost soul in their midst. Then, as new trends began, the most popular of which turned out to be minimalism, once again, I knew my music was an outlier. Minimalism was, plain and simply, deadly dull – a progression of repeating simple ideas waiting for something to happen, with no coherent structure or logic.

The one idea that I hung onto throughout, was that ALL of the elements of music (melody, counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, timbre, tonal relationships, structure) are necessary for music to impart a story – and have lasting emotional impact. My favorite works of music are like good, life-long friends. They are unique, they have their own personality, and they are complex and interesting creatures. Leave out any of the basic elements of music, and something is lost. And the greatest musical sin, in my view, is writing music that is emotionally detached. Interesting rhythms or timbres, perhaps, but if the composer seems to be hiding from their emotions, I lose all interest.

Back to where this started, I find all of these elements in Kenneth’s music – despite the very different way we got here or the different ways in which we approach writing music. Thankfully, there seem to be many more composers nowadays who think similarly, although I still find myself clicking off the music on many contemporary music radio channels, wondering to myself, what the heck, how did that make its way onto the radio?

And, yes, I am a late (very late) bloomer. It is only now, that I have stopped working full-time after a nearly 40 year career outside of music, that I have the luxury of time to write the major works that, over the years, I often dreamed about writing, but lacked the time. I only hope that the late start doesn’t banish my music to some composer purgatory, and that opportunities will arise for it all to be heard.

A friend in Germany, a viola d’amore player, asked me to compose something for a program she is planning based on Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, whose narrator is a viola d’amore player. Hunting around the house, I found an old, worn copy of the novel, probably Renee’s, as I don’t remember reading it before. Starting into its early pages, I am already hooked, after finding that, in addition to its many-layered themes, it is practically a music theory treatise.

In a chapter describing the music lessons given to the protagonist in his youth, Mann writes that half of each lesson was given over to discussions of philosophy and poetry. It was the teacher’s belief that “music itself, the goal of his teaching, if it were pursued one-sidedly and without connection with other fields of form, thought, and culture, seemed to him a stunting specialization, humanly speaking.”

Sharing that thought, as it is a good one. I remember thinking, when a conservatory student, the same thing – although not nearly as clearly. All everyone thought about or spoke about was music, music, music – but where was the rest of life? Both Renee and I, at the time, went outside the school to study at nearby universities and transfer the credits, so we could broaden our education. How could the music be any good if it was not informed by the rest of life – and knowledge and experience of other things. And, as focused as I am today on music, I’m so glad I did that back then. My music world is as much informed by ideas, by stories, by literature, by the swirl of world events, by history, by myth, as it is by anything purely musical. It is all of that together that breathes life into the music, which then music can breathe back into life.

Recently, listening to some music by a beginning composer, got me thinking about all of the elements of music – and the importance for any aspiring composer to gain mastery of all of those elements and incorporate them into their work. The basic building blocks, so to speak, of music include pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, tonality, texture, dynamics, timbre and form. Ignoring for the moment that different people may have slightly different lists, my purpose here is simply to convey the idea that music is a language made up of different elements – and the employment of those in combination is the art of composition.

Although it is no doubt a matter of taste, music compositions that are missing any of these basic building blocks leave me cold. As examples, while I intellectually understand what led to the attempt by so many to write music that avoids tonality, the push and pull of notes around tonal centers, whether long term or fleeting, for me is one of the critical elements that allows music to effect listeners emotionally. It is certainly not the only element that does so, but it is of such great importance, that it is not surprising to me that so called “atonal” music never captured a wider audience. Similarly, music that consists primarily of shifting harmonies but without melody, feel to me like empty music – and when I hear it, in my own imagination, I always find myself filling in the missing elements. That is the case for me with the majority of so called “minimalist” music. I can’t listen for more than a minute before I find myself desperately waiting for a melody to give it shape and direction. While it is apparent that music intended for quiet meditation has greatly influenced many composers over the past several decades, and listening to such compositions serves that purpose well, I rarely have the least desire to listen to it as music for music’s sake. The greatest pleasure for me, when listening to a new composition, is intently following the trail of the composer’s musical thought, mentally walking down a road with twists and turns, seeing interesting sights along the way as the music reveals its story and ultimate destination.

That sense of “going somewhere” in music is the essence of form – and by form, I do not mean to infer the use of the word as a description of classical forms – but any form that the composer creates to allow the music to tell its story. The greatest challenge, at least for me when composing, is making decisions about when to state something, when to counter that statement, whether to transition to something else – or to do so abruptly, when to repeat, when to contrast, and when to end. And, to do any of those things requires the manipulation of everything else – melody, counterpoint, textures, timbres, harmony, rhythm, and so on. Without the interplay of all of that, to create a musical “being” that seems to have its own personality and life, filled with thoughts, may have on the surface the apparent nature of music – but lacks the essence of what it is in music that makes it so effectively speak to our hearts.