Klarinet Archive - Posting 000098.txt from 2003/12

From: Dan Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Death of Meyer Kupferman
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 09:19:23 -0500

I knew Meyer and played a number of his works. He did several
compositions for basset horn. He was also a clarinetist of wide interests.

Dan Leeson

Meyer Kupferman, Composer in Many Forms, Dies at 77

December 3, 2003

By ALLAN KOZINN

Meyer Kupferman, a prolific composer whose music embraced
both jazz and 12-tone techniques, died on Wednesday near
Rhinebeck, N.Y. He was 77 and lived in Rhinebeck.

The cause was heart failure, said William Anderson, a
guitarist who has performed Mr. Kupferman's music and is a
friend of the family.

Mr. Kupferman embraced virtually every form available to
contemporary composers, writing 12 symphonies, nine ballets
and seven operas, along with electronic pieces, works that
combine taped sounds and live instruments and soundtrack
music for films. He composed 10 concertos, dozens of
picturesque orchestral works and more than 200 chamber and
solo works.

He was omnivorous stylistically, too, a quality he traced
back to childhood memories of his father's singing Yiddish
and Romanian songs to him, which he would imitate on the
clarinet, an instrument that he also used to imitate solos
in the big band jazz he heard on the radio.

He embodied some of these influences - as well as elements
of the Serialism that fascinated him later - in "The Garden
of My Father's House," a vibrant 1972 work for violin and
clarinet dedicated to his father's memory.

Those influences can be heard, in different proportions, in
many of his other works.

Mr. Kupferman was born in New York on July 3, 1926. After a
brief encounter with the violin, at age 5, he was drawn to
the clarinet when he was 10. He studied at the High School
of Music and Art and at Queens College, but although his
formal studies embraced music theory and orchestral and
chamber performance he regarded himself as a self-taught
composer.

Practical considerations dictated the shape of his early
career. Working as a jazz clarinetist in clubs on Coney
Island, he began scoring arrangements for the bands he
performed with, and for other musicians.

By the late 1940's, when he was in his early 20's, he began
concentrating on concert music. He wrote the first of
several piano concertos in 1948, also the year he completed
his first opera, a one-act children's work, "In a Garden,"
based on Gertrude Stein's "First Reader."

To hear his music performed, he persuaded some of his
colleagues to form an orchestra, called Composers Workshop.
Among the members of the ensemble who eventually became
well-known composers were Morton Feldman, Allan Blank and
Seymour Shifrin.

When Mr. Kupferman became interested in 12-tone composition
in the 1950's, he sought ways to retain the lyricism that
had been an attraction of his earlier music. One solution
was to develop a single tone row that through repetition in
several works would become familiar. Another was to temper
it with some of the influences that had always given his
music its particular accent.

These solutions propel the "Cycle of Infinities," a set of
more than 30 works, composed between 1961 and 1983. All 30
were based on the same tone row, but the works could hardly
have been more different. Among them were full-length
recitals for solo instruments, chamber pieces, a cantata
and a three-act opera, "The Judgement" (1966).

The jazz of Mr. Kupferman's youth continued to interest
him. Several works - including many of the "Infinities" -
call for a jazz ensemble. His String Quartet No. 6 bore the
title "Jazz Quartet," and when his "Jazz Symphony" was
given its premiere by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in
1988, he said it was a piece that he had been wanting to
write for 40 years. Reviewing it in The New York Times,
Bernard Holland wrote that Mr. Kupferman was on to
something.

"Here jazz and the symphonic style meet and argue, but they
never really come to terms," Mr. Holland wrote. "The
composer, in other words, seems to know which differences
of rhythm, phrase and color are irreconcilable. He does not
force them together."

In addition to composing, Mr. Kupferman taught composition
and directed an improvisatory ensemble at Sarah Lawrence
College from 1951 to 1993. He also published "Atonal Jazz"
(Dorn) a two-volume study of chromatic techniques in
contemporary jazz in 1992.

Mr. Kupferman is survived by his wife, Pei Fen; his
daughter, Lisa Pitt, of Putnam, N.Y., three stepsons, Fung
Chin and Sung Chin, of Westfield, N.J., and Yung Chin, of
Chappaqua, N.Y., and five grandchildren.

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