Robert Moevs

I first met Robert Moevs through his music. It was April 12, 1958 when George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra gave the world premiere of Three Symphonic Pieces. What I remember about that premiere is that the sounds were bold and startling. Their syntax was unlike anything I had heard previously, possibly excepting Le Sacre de Printemps. I seem dimly to remember a wild contrabassoon solo. Hearing this work left a deep impression.

A year and a half later I found myself in a class in harmony taught by the very composer of this unusual music. Mr. Moevs struck us as an intimidating figure, with an otherworldly gleam in his eye, who spoke slowly in a flat (he was born in Wisconsin) but intense—even incensed—tone. The first class, in which he discussed modulation, consisted of philosophical reflections on existence—being somewhere, going somewhere, returning to where you thought you were. There was to be nothing routine about establishing a key and then changing it: these were matters of deep significance. Plato and Aristotle were invoked. One left class almost frightened.

During the first weeks he played the piano very little. Thus we were unprepared when, during a preposterously difficult ear training exercise, he tossed off the first Chopin Etude. We were expected to write down an harmonic analysis as he played. The virtuosity was so dazzling that no one could even begin. We had to ask him please to slow down. I remember a sheepish grin of embarrassment that he had perhaps been caught out in a display of technique rather than something loftier; he seemed more human and accessible from that point on.

While we were in college, Moevs’s Attis, on a Catullus poem, was premiered by the Boston Symphony and his String Quartet by the Claremont Quartet. Both works caused quite a stir.

In senior year I entered Robert Moevs’s seminar in composition. The first and only assignment was to take the sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes and subject it to some suitable transformation so that it could form the basis of music in a contemporary style. The chant melody was to give us a link to the past as well as a common starting point; but the six of us were each encouraged to go in our own direction. Stylistic coherence and consistency—this was after all the Sixties and he was a Boulanger pupil—were to be our aims. Only one member of the class resolutely resisted the notion of what was then considered a contemporary idiom: he preferred to write songs in the style of Schubert. This did not distress Robert: he took the effort seriously and gave advice about accompaniments and word setting.

The composition seminar met Monday afternoons and was devoted to a discussion of instruments, notation, structural principles, a close review of our individual efforts, along with further Aristotelian ruminations. Robert Moevs was never long-winded. After a thoughtful, penetrating, silent perusal of newly composed measures, he would typically distill his advice into one beautifully concentrated, devastating, “Well….” Further elaboration was generally unnecessary. That which went unsaid was inferred, intuited, absorbed by osmosis. His facial expression told a lot.

After graduation I followed Robert Moevs to Rome, where he spent his Guggenheim, and then to Rutgers, where I worked with him while obtaining a master’s degree. He was the ideal mentor. Whether as a coach for piano performances, an adviser with orchestration, an encourager during moments of self-doubt, or a caution during moments of over-confidence, I have counted on him for most of my adult life. He was an excellent musician, with a wonderful sense of humor.