“Safety lurks wherever we turn. Show me dangerous music.”

As this article was about to go to press, the news of the unexpected death of Lukas Foss in his New York City home on Sunday, February 1, reached the composer’s many colleagues, friends, and admirers here in Western New York. The composer’s death adds a special poignancy to the concert of his music by A Musical Feast, at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center this coming Sunday afternoon.

Lukas Foss

Hard on the heels of the hugely popular opening of its beautiful new building last November, the Burchfield-Penney jumps out front and center in the local avant-garde artistic scene, offering the third installment of its periodic RendezBlue Festival. This year’s version of the RendezBlue Festival, themed “Time Cycle,” runs for four days, from Thursday, February 5, through Sunday, February 8.

The synergistic, multidiscipline, multimedia, multi-participant “happening,” to resurrect a quintessentially 1960s term, that the RendezBlue Festival promises to be, is the kind of cutting-edge, high-art-meets-popular-culture event that no self-proclaimed modernist, or even post-modernist, will want to miss.

Lukas Foss and the BPO

Lukas Foss, performer, composer, conductor, and above all else musician, was the most important figure in the musical life of Buffalo in the last half century. When Foss was appointed to the post of music director in 1963, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra already had a well-established reputation playing the mainstream classical European repertory, greatly strengthened during the nine-year tenure of the orchestra’s departing Viennese-born maestro, Josef Krips. Foss’s debut concert also marked, amazingly enough, the BPO’s debut performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. That work had notoriously caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913, and while it took 50 years for The Rite of Spring to have its Buffalo premiere, the BPO audience responded enthusiastically.

Foss had only started his efforts to drag BPO audiences into the late 20th century. Within a few short years, the BPO was playing more new music than any major symphony orchestra in America. Naturally enough, many longtime BPO subscribers were less than enthralled, but Foss persevered, winning new audience members while opening the minds of many of those same longtime BPO supporters. An example of Foss’s creative programming that vividly comes to mind is a concert from December 1970, the first season after he had resigned as music director, while remaining as principal guest conductor. That program included Debussy’s Trois Nocturnes, but also Varèse’s seminal Hyperprism and Ragas for the Sarod with “Geod,” Foss’s own joint composition with the noted Bengali sarod virtuoso, Ali Akbar Khan—very progressive programming, even for today.

In the seven seasons that he served as music director and the one season as principal guest conductor and de facto music director, Foss, who was already a highly regarded composer, programmed only four of his own compositions in the BPO’s regular classic series. The late Jesse Levine, principal violist for the BPO under Lukas Foss, noted his generosity towards other composers of new music in an interview given shortly before his death last fall. “The wonderful thing about Lukas is that when he presented new music, he almost never presented his own music,” Levine said. “If he played 20 pieces of other people, he might sneak in one of his own, but he was in a sense selfless about it and never took advantage of the fact that he was music director in order to propagate his own music, and that was noticed and honored by everyone that worked with him.”

Foss’s generosity of spirit might still serve as a guiding example, especially in the academic world, where so much of new music now has its main and sometimes only exposure.

Foss and the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts

Foss’s influence on the musical life of Buffalo and the city’s international musical reputation extended far beyond his leadership of the BPO. Of equal importance was the key part that Foss played in the creation of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY at Buffalo. During his first year in Buffalo, Foss joined with Alan Sapp, the chairman of UB’s Music Department, to convince the Rockefeller Foundation and the State of New York to establish the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts on the UB campus. Former BPO clarinetist Edward Yadzinski, a long-time colleague and friend of Foss, describes the result as being “one of the greatest coups in the history of 20th-century new music. The Center opened at UB with 19 full-time, non-teaching appointments of extraordinary young composers and instrumentalists from around the world. While the necessary high level of state funding prevailed for just a few years, the Center nevertheless managed to maintain its Evenings for New Music series at the Albright-Knox Gallery and at Carnegie Recital Hall for more than a decade. The creative inertia from those years at UB later evolved into the June in Buffalo Festival, originally initiated by Morton Feldman for the performance of new music, currently directed by UB’s David Felder. A lapse in the June in Buffalo events for several years was filled in the 1980s and early 1990s at UB by the North American New Music Festival, initiated by the late Yvar Mikhashoff and co-directed by Jan Williams.”

After the end of his tenure with the BPO, Foss went on to other posts, becoming the music director of both the Milwaukee Symphony and the Jerusalem Philharmonic, and later the Brooklyn Philharmonic, an orchestra that he completely transformed during his long tenure into one of the most important and innovative ensembles in New York City.

Buffalo area residents will best remember Foss, however, for the vast, far-reaching, and long-lasting effect that he had on our city’s cultural life. It is no exaggeration to say that no other musician has ever had as beneficial and long-lived effect on the city’s cultural life. Everyone who knew him, loved his music, or felt his influence on the cultural life of this city will genuinely miss Lukas Foss.

Celebrating Lukas Foss

Charles Haupt, the long-serving and now retired concertmaster of the BPO, was originally recruited by Foss. A few years ago Haupt established A Musical Feast, the premier professional chamber music group in Buffalo. Up to this point, it has presented its innovative and invariably interesting concerts in the Kavinoky Theatre on the D’Youville College campus. This Sunday afternoon, February 8, the group will have the honor of presenting the initial classical music concert in the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Auditorium of the new Burchfield-Penney Art Center. Many who knew Lukas Foss best will perform in the concert, which is devoted to his music. A panel discussion moderated by Edward Yadzinski will precede the concert at 2pm. The panel will feature many past and present friends and colleagues of Lukas Foss, including Haupt, Jan Williams, Jerry Kirkbride, Nils Vigeland, Carol Wincenc David Felder, and Charles Z. Bornstein.

Foss was, if anything, an eclectic composer, and his continuing exploration of the infinite variety of musical possibilities defied classification. One contributor to the relative lack of acceptance of his compositions into the mainstream of classical music performance may be this eclecticism, which has prevented critical opinion from pigeonholing him as an avant-gardist, or a serial composer, or a minimalist, or a postmodern neo-romantic. Critics are often leery of someone whose body of work refuses to be stereotyped (“Am I missing the point of this piece? Best not to commit myself—or better yet be wittily dismissive with faintly ironic praise.”)

The music of J.S. Bach was influential in Foss’s career. He programmed it often, sometimes conducting it from the keyboard as a piano soloist, and he recorded many of the solo piano works. Several of Foss’s Two-Part Inventions inspired by the music of Bach will be performed by Amy Williams, who will also play Foss’ 1988 work Solo. Local audiences may remember the Buffalo native best as one-half of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo that wowed a sell-out crowd at a Hallwalls concert two seasons ago, performing the very challenging music of Conlon Nancarrow.

Charles Borstein will be the pianist in Foss’s witty 1988 work For Lenny: Variation on New York, New York.

Carol Wincenc, Buffalo’s favorite flute player, commissioned the 1986 Renaissance Flute Concerto from Foss, and the work proved to be an international hit from its premiere, subsequently enjoying a couple of performances with the BPO. Wincenc will be the flutist in a version of the work for flute and piano, with Claudia Hoca as the pianist.

The other big piece on the program is Foss’ Time Cycle. At the conclusion of Time Cycle’s premiere by the New York Philharmonic in 1960, conductor Leonard Bernstein told the audience, “My colleagues and I think so highly of this work that we will play it all over again.” The next year, Foss made the chamber music version of the work that will be heard on Sunday. Foss’s settings of the four works—dealing with the mysteries of time by W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Franz Kafka, and Friedrich Nietzsche—are silkily subtle, spiked with occasional dissonances that do not distract from the intelligibility of the texts. The ability of Foss to make his music serve rather than distract from the poetry of the word in this work help explain its enduring appeal. Dawn Upshaw sang it recently at Tanglewood, and the New York City Opera is offering multiple performances of it while touring the city’s five boroughs for its 2008-2009 season while its home in Lincoln Center undergoes renovations. Amanda DeBoer (soprano), Jerry Kirkbride (clarinet), Jonathan Golove (cello), Tom Kolor (percussion), and Amy Williams (piano) will perform under the baton of Jan Williams.

In an off-the-cuff interview the day before Foss died, Jan Williams, a longtime friend and collaborator of Lukas Foss, summed up his impressions of the composer with these words, written by Foss himself for his composition Paradigm: “To take refuge in the past is to play safe. Safety lurks wherever we turn. Show me dangerous music.”

Lukas Foss was a true original. He will be missed.

UB professor and AV correspondent Bruce Jackson has some nice photos of a much younger Lukas Foss here: http://brucejacksonphotography.us/LukasFoss/index.html.