Big man on campus

Composer Elliott Schwartz retires from Bowdoin

By J. Mark Scearce

A Celebration of Elliott Schwartz, at Kresge Auditorium, Bowdoin College campus, February 16, at 7:30 p.m. Call (207) 725-3321.

FISTS OF FURY: Elliott Schwartz lets loose on the clavier.

There aren’t that many tall composers in history (though plenty of little ones). Alban Berg was a tall man, and Rachmaninoff was a giant with hands that could easily accommodate the parallel tenths of his compositions.

Elliott Schwartz, too, is a big man, a bear of a man, and, when Bowdoin throws him a retirement party-cum-concert Saturday night, there he’ll be, towering over everyone, just as his new-music presence in Maine has for nearly 40 years.

In Kyoto, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, Amsterdam, Bellagio, Leningrad; American music for the BBC; festivals out the ying-yang — Reykjavik for crying out loud — Elliott Schwartz has been there and done it.

At home, his compositions have been performed by the Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland Chamber Symphonies, the Minnesota Orchestra, Atlanta Virtuosi, and New York Chamber Soloists. Recordings of his music can be heard on New World, CRI, Innova, Capstone, Vienna Modern Masters, Metier, and GM.

“One of the foremost composers of contemporary American music” is how the Bowdoin press describe him, and, in honor of that fact and his pending retirement from that campus, the Phoenix paid a visit to the big and tall store of contemporary music for a retrospective.

Brighton Beach memoir

I was the only child in South Brooklyn that could correctly pronounce ‘Bowdoin’ as well as spell it,” Schwartz proudly exclaims. It’s evidence of his family’s long history in Portland and his familiarity with the place he has made his intellectual home for 38 years.

Born January 19, 1936, and raised in Brighton Beach — ”the movie of Neil Simon’s play was on location a block away from the house I grew up in” — Schwartz used to take the train from New York’s Grand Central Station north to Portland’s Union Station to visit his uncles and cousins, who had settled in Maine after immigrating from Toronto.

By 1953, Schwartz was at Columbia University, during a very exciting time for music — the very year after the first concert of taped music at the Museum of Modern Art. “We actually wore beanies during freshmen week,” Schwartz interjects.

At Columbia, Schwartz studied with Otto Luening, who, with Vladimir Ussachevsky, was a tape-music pioneer. Together with composers Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions, this fearsome foursome founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the first of its kind, and a tremendous influence on the new music of the post-World War generation.

In fact, it was during that very freshmen week, Schwartz recalls, that Luening and Ussachevsky came and spoke, bringing recordings of their new-fangled electronic music. “Every Columbia freshman was exposed to this,” Schwartz recollects, still amazed. He was hooked.

With three degrees behind him, including the Ed.D, Schwartz left Columbia for the wilds of the new world, first at Amherst, then on to Bowdoin where he has remained.

Beyond eclecticism

Fearless” is one of the appellations Schwartz has acquired over the years — and is most fond of. He recognizes, however, that this is thrown his way as both a compliment and potential criticism — he’s “fearless” for his adventuresome compositional combinations. For the audience of this music of the last century — the 20th century — “adventuresome” can often be more alienating than inviting. Schwartz wears this dichotomy as a badge of honor, and, over time, his audience has come to him.

Just this last fall, in the September issue of 21st Century Music, he was favorably compared to Johannes Brahms for his ability to synthesize widely divergent materials into a distinctive style. Synthesizing divergent materials may just be the best way of rephrasing the headline concerning his music that Schwartz has come to call his favorite: “Beyond Eclecticism,” given him by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Page in the New York Times. This intermingling of worlds is the name of the game for Schwartz.

Having written for orchestras, for string quartets, for all manner of conventional instrumentation, Schwartz, too, has mixed into this musical stew quotations of older works, taped fragments of electronic music, percussion played by other instrumentalists, stagings, lighting, all manner of drama to bring the single element of texture to the fore; to simply make us aware of the levels of sound.

So what is it that Schwartz does so well? He combines different sounds, sounds often not even meant to be together: One recent work, Bird, involves not only a woodwind quintet, but recordings of Charlie “Bird” Parker, songs of the English composer William Byrd, and quotations of an older work of Schwartz’s, also called (you guessed it) Bird. In the visual art world, this borders on the postmodern.

“I’ve never invented anything from scratch,” Schwartz confesses, “but combined divergent materials, found materials, making new connections.” Electronics are a part of this, but only in a theatrical sense. “I realized that it was not so much what was on the tape so much as the medium,” Schwartz explains, “where you placed the speakers.”

While many of us may contemplate the best speaker placement in our houses, Schwartz has taken this a step further. His speakers are in essence his performers, and what they are saying is less important than from where in the room they say it. In the 1964 testament to his time, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan writes that “in a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.”

This “bit of a shock,” this theatrical sense, is in all of Schwartz’s music. When pressed as to how this all relates to his own particular style, Schwartz explains: “It reflects or projects a personality, not so much in the nature of the materials, but in the connections between them.” These connections and collisions run throughout his music and in and out of his discussions of it.

But over the years, Schwartz recounts, “I have had a lot of different students writing many different kinds of music — minimal, serial, indeterminate, electronic, computer, ultra-traditional — and I never tried to convert them, but took what was most interesting and sharpened the focus, refined the message. It’s not my business [what they want to write], only to show them what is on the menu.”

Bowdoin days

Not many know this, but for years Elliott Schwartz was a restaurant reviewer for the Maine Times. By day: mild-mannered composer teaching composition, pulling notes out of the ether. By night: cape-clad taste-tester, sneaking in, unsuspected, to your local dining establishment, ordering up a sampling of specials, and, canapé in one hand and pen in the other, writing them up. Seems Schwartz was always writing something.

And it is not just writing music, but writing about music that has brought Schwartz his notice in the world of music. While on faculty at Bowdoin, Elliott Schwartz co-edited the popular anthology Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, co-authored the seminal Music Since 1945, and authored The Electronic Music Listener’s Guide. He has also written essays and reviews for Perspectives of New Music, The Musical Quarterly, Musical America, and Music and Musicians.

But when Elliott Schwartz first rolled into Bowdoin in ’64, he was the first of two new hires and only the second full-time tenure-track of a three-member music faculty. “I grew up in a fertile time with interest in music of total control and total chance and interesting combinings of the two,” says Schwartz.

It’s important to remember just how opposing these musical camps were. On one hand you had composers totally and completely obsessed with notating infinitesimal minutiae, and on the other, open to the whims and fancies of — I kid you not — a scampering cockroach to make the musical decisions for them.

After the formal education at Columbia, though, Schwartz’s real learning began. A student at the now infamous Bennington Composers’ Conference during the early ’60s, Schwartz came under the spell of Henry Brant — “the only American composer to take [father of American modern classical music, Charles] Ives seriously.”

Through Brant, Schwartz was made aware of the music of Carl Ruggles and so, early on in Bowdoin days, Schwartz mounted the first major retrospective of Ruggles’s music “all done on brown wrapping paper with Crayola crayons.” Those were the days . . .

A community of composers

When it comes to creating, often it takes creating, as well, a community of like-minded individuals. And while many know Elliott Schwartz as an innovator and new music polyglot, few see all the “advocating” it takes to get that new music heard.

This behind-the-scenes moving and shaking is the ambassadorial role Schwartz is known for within the profession: president of the College Music Society, VP of the American Music Center, national chair of the Society of Composers, Inc.

But Schwartz is nothing if not an active musical participant in the “think globally, act locally” philosophy. Here in Maine, he was the first president of the Maine Composer’s Forum and founding member of the Maine New Music Network.

“The PSO has played my music over the years, Peter Martin’s [USM] Wind Ensemble, the Portland String Quartet, a lot of Portland performing ensembles have performed my music,” Schwartz lists proudly.

He has formed collaborations with the Maine College of Art over the years, as well as with the Portland Museum of Art, and alliances, too, with many composers throughout the state, both freelance and those attached to universities — at USM, Colby, Bates, UMO.

“I have tried to be active in a formal way,” muses Schwartz, “through committees and on boards and in various positions of leadership; drafting statements, lobbying for the cause of 20th-century music.” And locally, what might he wish for yet?

“What is needed still,” Schwartz dreams, “is a single series — once a month, say — in a single venue, so that audiences know new music is happening at a certain place and time.”

Hey, Endowing Foundation, surely that’s an opportunity for tribute to Schwartz’s lasting legacy of new music in Maine!

Multiple exposures

Throughout the discussion with Schwartz, and listening to his music, one hears a common philosophy while the manifestation of that idea is eternally varied. It’s not surprising then to find Schwartz dwelling on textures, or finding in his music a kinship to the multiple exposures found in visual art.

“It’s really how they collide,” Schwartz offers up. Like a mantra, this is his recurrent refrain. And few things collide like the responsibilities of a composer’s life.

“Composers have to have a split personality,” Schwartz muses. “We have to have this hermetic world with absolute quiet — absolutely no sounds — to work in. There is a story, I don’t know if you’ve heard, that Sibelius fired house painters for whistling while he worked.

“But then music is a very social art. We open the doors of our studios and out in the world a party is going on. People are eating and drinking and laughing and we as composers must negotiate this world of performers, conductors, publishers, copyists. It is important to live in both worlds.”

Saturday’s concert right here at home in the great state of Maine will indeed be a party and one to remember this giant of a man. Besides a retrospective concert of Schwartz chamber works, the program will also include brief works composed by the composer’s former students: Richard Francis, Scott Vaillancourt, David Gamper, DJ Spooky, Nathan Michel, Francis Kayali, Jesse Shore, Libby Van Cleve, and David Sherman.

One thing is for sure: filling Schwartz’s shoes will be a big job for anyone — size 15W, in fact!

Composer J. Mark Scearce and his ten-and-a-halfs can be reached at scearce@usm.maine.edu.