In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Elie Siegmeister, American Composer: A Bio-Bibliography
  • Howard Pollack
Elie Siegmeister, American Composer: A Bio-Bibliography. By Leonard J. Lehrman and Kenneth O. Boulton. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. [xix, 456 p. ISBN 9780810869615. $75.] Illustrations, discography, bibliography, bibliography, indexes.

Having published a monumental bio-bibliography of composer Marc Blitzstein only a few years ago, composer-pianist Leonard J. Lehrman has now coauthored with Kenneth O. Boulton another mammoth work of this kind, this one on composer Elie Siegmeister (1909-91). In the "biographical essay" that comprises a good portion of this book, the authors explain that Lehrman, a lifelong disciple who studied with Siegmeister prior to his work at Harvard and Cornell, at one point hoped to write a biography of the composer; and that Boulton, a pianist now on the faculty at Southeastern Louisiana University, planned on compiling a bio-bibliography. But after the Siegmeister estate refused access to the composer's private correspondence at the Library of Congress, Lehrman and Boulton decided to work together. Apparently Boulton took principal responsibility for the annotated discography; Lehrman, for the biographical essay.

Widely known at one time, especially for his arrangements of folk songs, Siegmeister has become a rather forgotten figure, especially since his death. He never wrote that breakthrough work that might have firmly established his name. But if he no longer commands the position that he did in the 1940s, when Mitropoulos, Stokowski, and Toscanini championed his music, or even in the 1970s and 1980s, when Sergiu Comis siona, Cho-Liang Lin, and Lorin Maazel played his work, he continues to attract dedicated and skilled performers to his cause. A modest bibliography, including sympathetic endorsements by, among others, Nicholas Tawa and Carol Oja, has also accrued. And a number of his students, including not only Lehrman, but Michael Beckerman, Herbert Deutsch, and Daniel Dorff, maintain his legacy in various ways.

The 170-page biographical essay—more of a chronicle, really—that opens this tome forms a little monograph in itself, tracing Siegmeister's life chronologically, and concluding with summaries of related activities since his death. Siegmeister was born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants; his father was a pharmacist turned surgeon, while his older brother William, described by Elie as a "sun-worshipper, theosophist, biosophist, and God-knows-what, inventor of twenty different religions of his own," became a writer (p. 3). The whole family, unconventional in their politics and religion, seems to have been rather eccentric. After William established one of his "nature colonies" in Panama, mother Bessie, in her sixties, reportedly traveled twenty miles into the jungle on mule to find him there.

In the mid-1920s, Siegmeister, a pianist, studied composition with Seth Bingham at [End Page 525] Columbia College, and privately with Wallingford Riegger. The discovery of Copland, in particular his Music for the Theatre, during this time came as a revelation. Siegmeister took the music's vitality to heart, if not its refinement. Indeed, the relationship with Copland became vexed over the years, possibly because Siegmeister could never shake the older man's influence—as evident enough not only in his folkloric efforts, but such abstract pieces as the Theme and Variations #2 (1967), deeply indebted as it is to Copland's Piano Variations. He operated, in any case, very much in Copland's shadow. In the 1975 taped interviews that provide many of the quotations in this essay, Siegmeister described Copland as "a very limited composer" whose "material is thin, his emotion miniscule," a composer who in later years produced "terrible junk" (p. 6). Siegmeister seems to have been almost a little paranoid on the subject, suggesting that Copland was "envious" of him (pp. 85-86), and implying the presence of a sort of exclusionary gay or gay-friendly musical "ring" that included Thomson, Bowles, Diamond, Carter, and Bernstein (p. 34). Siegmeister's defensiveness—this time against the modernist establishment—comes through in an anecdote about Leon Kirchner as well (p. 60).

Siegmeister pursued his studies with Nadia Boulanger for three years in the 1920s—he had unkind things to say about her, too—and then returned to New York, where he studied conducting at Juilliard. By this time...

pdf

Share