Kenneth Fuchs: Point of tranquility

My seventh album for Naxos, Point of Tranquility (Seven Works for Symphonic Winds), recorded by the United States Coast Guard Band, is a dream-come-true recording project. I was first inspired to become a composer through my early exposure to band music in high school. Throughout the course of my career, I have composed a number of works for wind band, including overtures, concerti, and tone poems, and I knew that one day I would release an album devoted exclusively to these scores. 

I became a professional composer due to the profound musical mentorship I received from Bentley Shellahamer, band director at the newly-constructed Piper High School, in Sunrise, Florida (just west of Fort Lauderdale), where I was a student from 1970 to 1974. I met Dr. Shellahamer during his first year at Piper, and he has remained one of the most important people in my musical life during the last five decades.  

When I first told Dr. Shellahamer, during the summer of 1973, that I wanted to try to compose music, he enthusiastically encouraged me to write original music for our “Band of Pride.” The most encouraging words he said to me were, “I will play everything you write.” He did, and by hearing my music immediately after I wrote it, I began to develop concepts about how to voice chords correctly and resonantly for large ensemble and how to properly score melody and harmony for symphonic winds.  

Then, Alfred Reed was my first composition teacher in college. I studied with him for four years, from 1975 to 1979, as an undergraduate major in composition at the University of Miami School of Music. The faculty at the School of Music also included composers Clifton Williams and John Kinyon and conductor Frederick Fennell – all pioneers in the band medium. In addition to being surrounded by several of the most prominent composers in the band field at the time, I also played piccolo for four years in the wind ensemble under Fennell’s baton, learning all the classic wind band literature of the 20th Century that he recorded for Mercury Records with the Eastman Wind Ensemble, which he founded in 1952. 

I became very close to Alfred Reed and his wife, Margie. I sometimes traveled with him to his professional engagements around the country, observing him conduct collegiate and honor bands, listening to him discuss his music. He was a masterful orchestrator for winds, brass, and percussion, and I learned how to compose for the band medium from him. Reed believed in the power of critical acceptance, and he wanted to compose music that pleased his audiences. He did not pander to audiences, but he was just as happy if they left the concert hall whistling one of his tunes. He believed in creating music that has a clear formal structure that listeners can comprehend on first hearing, and he instilled that belief in me. This is important because music exists in time, and it has to be understood as it is happening.  

With Reed, I studied mostly tonal music, up through the early 20th Century. We did not seriously explore post-tonal music. That would come later for me. 

Immediately after I graduated from the University of Miami, I moved to New York City. I wanted to attend The Juilliard School and study with Vincent Persichetti. During my undergraduate studies, I had developed an intense interest in the music of American symphonic composers, such as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Peter Mennin, Walter Piston, and William Schuman. I wanted to learn how to compose in that musical language but in my own voice. I believed that Persichetti, one of America’s most prolific composers and respected symphonists, who also created an enduring body of wind literature, would be the right next teacher for me. 

When I arrived at Juilliard in the fall of 1979, the composition faculty, a Who’s Who of American music, included Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti, and Roger Sessions. Peter Mennin was president of the School. His immediate predecessor was William Schuman, who went on to serve as the first president of Lincoln Center. 

I studied at Juilliard for nine years, from 1979 to 1988, and received both my master of music and doctor of musical arts degrees in composition from the School. Initially, Vincent Persichetti’s studio was full, so I studied first with David Diamond, for two years. Diamond took his role as a teacher very seriously. He was a taskmaster and could sometimes be a difficult personality to deal with. We were not very close. The atmosphere at Juilliard was extremely competitive, and it stood in sharp contrast to the warm and supportive environment I had experienced under the tutelage of Alfred Reed at the University of Miami. Diamond used the masterworks of Western music as models to discuss compositional procedure. We did not discuss band music. He was devoted to form and counterpoint. Our weekly lessons included discussion of my music as well as various other musical scores he suggested that I study. I began to address gaps in my knowledge of repertoire, especially the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and other post-tonal and serial composers. It took me several years to absorb this music and its procedures and to ultimately determine what validity it held for me as a composer, if any at all. 

After two years of tough love, Diamond’s didactic approach began to wear thin for me.  Fortunately, Persichetti’s studio opened up and he took me in, and not a moment too soon. I needed a more open and less constrictive student-teacher relationship. The five years I spent with Persichetti were a revelation. He treated me as an equal and put no pressure on me to compose in any particular manner or style. I finally felt free to compose what I was hearing in my head, without worrying about whether or not he would make a value judgment about the music I was writing. I wrote a lot of music that I have now discarded, but it was an important time for me in terms of finding my own creative voice and building my self-confidence as a composer. Persichetti was a remarkable musician and had total command of the literature and materials of music.  He was a facile keyboardist and could read a full orchestral score at sight.  

I was distraught when Persichetti died from smoking-related cancer in August 1987. He set me walking straight on the rocky path of becoming a professional composer, and we had become friends. I still had questions, though, about the kind of music I wanted to compose, and I was fortunate that Milton Babbitt accepted me as a student during my final year of doctoral study. I told Babbitt that I was not pleased with how my music moved forward. He asked me, “What are you not pleased with, how the music sounds on the surface, or how it is structured underneath?” I responded the latter, and we began to analyze the later works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. I also took very seriously the organizational principles of serialism that Charles Wuorinen set forth in his book Simple Composition. Although I was devoted to becoming a composer of contemporary concert hall music, I had also developed, from age ten, a serious and enduring interest in musical theater. Babbitt loved and knew well the music of the American popular songbook. Given the avant-garde style of music he composed, few people believed this, but it is true. His most famous student, from the mid-1950’s, was Stephen Sondheim. I deeply admired Sondheim’s work and had already studied it for many years. Sondheim was at the pinnacle of his success on Broadway, and I knew virtually every note of all his work. Babbitt and I became fast friends and we talked for hours about Sondheim, the repertoire of American musical theater, and post-tonal music! 

One of the advantages of involving myself in the diverse artistic milieu of New York City was finding many sources of inspiration—including non-musical ones. I became interested in exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist art. During my visits to museums and galleries, studying paintings, collages, and sculptures, it occurred to me that the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism — states of feeling expressed through gesture — is as relevant to music as to painting. In 1983, I discovered the work of Helen Frankenthaler, a leading figure in Color Field painting, and it made a significant impact on my creative life.  

I was first introduced to Frankenthaler’s work in the fall of 1983 by my life partner Chris von Rosenvinge, through the television documentary titled “Helen Frankenthaler — Toward a New Climate.” I was bowled over by the beauty of Helen’s painting and her free-wheeling creative attitude. This encounter helped me eventually to find my own creative path and surmount the doctrinaire rhetoric of avant-garde musical composition that prevailed in the 1980’s (even though the move toward the “new Romanticism” was already under way)

I wrote Helen a letter shortly after I saw the documentary, telling her why I liked her work, and she wrote back immediately. She lived on East 94th Street, and I on West 71st Street. I was amazed that someone so famous would actually take an interest in what I had to say. I took her work very seriously, and I think she sensed that I wasn’t a hound or a toady — I understood what she was trying to do and it resonated with me. Helen invited me to a forthcoming show that December at the Emmerich Gallery, and we met there. As you might imagine, I was awestruck and thrilled to meet an artist whose work I admired so deeply. The first painting I saw as I walked into the gallery was Out of the Dark. I looked at the patch of raw canvas on the upper right corner with all the paint rushing toward that spot and instantly my creative instincts harmonized with the image. It was as if my own creative aesthetic was shown to me. I will never forget that moment. 

Once I graduated from Juilliard and began to compose on my own without the advice of a teacher, I eventually developed a personal musical voice, which flows from my love of American symphonic music. I continued to study many different scores for several years, especially during the first few years just after Juilliard. I had already composed a lot of music by that time, but by the early 1990’s I felt confident in what I was hearing, so I eventually began to pay close attention to my creative instinct. 

My music is often inspired by visual art, poetry, or prose, and sometimes by a programmatic image that I do not reveal through the title of the work. Morris Louis, along with his contemporaries, Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland, became one of the leading figures of Color Field painting. His luminous canvas, “Point of Tranquility,” provided the inspiration for this recording, Point of Tranquility (Seven Works for Symphonic Winds). My goal was to create a recording of serious music for wind band that reveals the power of the medium and that reflects in sound my voice in American musical composition. 

My goal is to compose music that is colorful and emotionally direct. To borrow a phrase from the theater, a piece should “work.” The audience should be always intrigued, but never baffled. The role of any artist is to speak in a clear, honest, and direct voice. It is only by doing this that the artist will be heard by society.  

Artists have a unique opportunity, and even a responsibility, to deepen society’s perception of the world we live in. My work, Falling Man, a dramatic scena for baritone voice and orchestra based on a text by Don De Lillo, depicts the events, aftermath, and tragically changed lives of 9/11. Following its recording by the London Symphony Orchestra, a staged version was presented at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the tragedy.  

As we live through one of the darkest periods in modern history, I hope that the works recorded on this album by the exceptional United States Coast Guard Band will lead listeners to a Point of Tranquility. 

- Written by Kenneth Fuchs

Kenneth Fuchs is one of America’s leading classical composers.