Constructing a Relevant Past: Mel Powell’s Beethoven Analogs

Powell: The Anxiety of (a Lack of) Influence

Few American composers of concert music in the twentieth century have had a career path as singular as that of Mel Powell; one has to look to Charles Ives to find a major American composer who composed for the concert hall trained in a similarly heterodox manner.¹ Until he began his studies with Paul Hindemith in 1948 at Yale University, Powell’s roundabout path to composition as a primary métier had the benefit of allowing him to find and refine a strong, unique compositional voice; it also exacted a price, namely the absence of a strong teacher and role model. Powell’s String Quartet of 1948, Beethoven Analogs, provides a crucial chapter in the story of how Powell surmounted this absence and found his own compositional voice.

Powell was born in the Bronx, New York, to well-educated Jewish immigrants in 1923 and was classically trained as a child. His interest in composing concert music stretches back to his piano lessons with a Manhattan teacher named Sara Barg, an immigrant from Germany.² Barg taught Powell from the age of five or so; their lessons continued into his early adolescence.³ Despite her thoroughly Teutonic pedagogical style and repertoire preferences, Barg had an affinity for George Gershwin’s music and encouraged her pupil in his first essays in composition. Starting with compositions that modeled the Classical and Romantic repertoire that Powell was learning to play, Barg encouraged his own first foray into original composition as well, despite her own lack of affinity for contemporary repertoire (Gershwin aside). As Powell recalled in a 1983 interview,

I think while she was concerned only with the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century European literature—she felt at home with it and loved and knew it and so on, knew every characteristic—she was taken by Gershwin. I remember that. I was not, but she was. And when I wrote my first major effort at the age of eight—it was called The Skyscraper Symphony—I remember her helping me to Gershwinize it. [Laughter] I do recall that.⁴

While in his teens, Powell began studying composition privately with two members of the faculty at the Juilliard School of Music, Bernard Wagenaar and Joseph Schillinger.⁵ Until his discovery of swing in his mid-teens—and for several years thereafter—Powell seemed destined for a career as a concert pianist and, perhaps, classical composer. Graduating from high school at the age of fifteen, he enrolled in City College, pursuing the respectable sort of striving after education and artistic pedigree that would have made cultured Old World parents like his proud.

When Melvin was thirteen, his younger brother Lloyd insisted that Melvin accompany him to the Paramount theatre to hear Benny Goodman and his orchestra, then in the first blush of their early nationwide popularity. It took a few years for the jazz bug to afflict Powell with full force. Throughout his teens, Powell’s studies in the classical, European, so-called legitimate musical tradition contended with his newfound love of jazz; he played in a pickup group with some neighborhood boys and emulated pianists of the sort that his mother would not approve of, such as Willie “The Lion” Smith, the Harlem stride piano master, and Earl “Fatha” Hines, who had been an early collaborator with Louis Armstrong.⁶ By the age of seventeen, Powell was playing in small ensembles in Greenwich Village, notably at a place called Nick’s. Gradually, between 1936–39 he dropped his classical piano lessons, his compositional lessons, and the coursework he had begun at City College. In much demand as a result of his gig at Nick’s, Powell was recruited by Benny Goodman in 1941 as the pianist for the latter’s big band and small ensembles. He also contributed a number of new arrangements of standards and pop hits as well as a number of original charts to the Goodman repertoire.

Barely eighteen, Powell experienced musical and commercial success under circumstances that would have been difficult for an even more seasoned professional to...