Lukas Foss

Lukas Foss: Capriccio (1946) [on YouTube]

Composer, conductor, teacher and pianist Lukas Foss (1922-2009) was born in Germany (as Lukas Fuchs), and his prodigious musical talent was recognized at an early age. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, his family moved first to Paris, and then, in 1937, to the United States, where the 15-year-old Lukas continued his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He became a U.S. citizen in 1942, and went on to become a driving force in American music. Foss held professorships at UCLA (following Arnold Schoenberg), SUNY Buffalo and Boston University, and was composer-in-residence at Harvard, the Manhattan School of Music, Carnegie Melon University, Yale University and Boston University. He was music director/conductor of various ensembles and orchestras, including symphonies in Buffalo, Brooklyn, and Milwaukee, as well as in Jerusalem, and he used these positions to share his abiding affection for the music of previous eras, while also championing contemporary works. One might say Foss's own compositional output was "exploratory" in that it encompasses many of the diverse musical styles associated with the 20th Century, and he prided himself on being "crazy in the sense of unexpected." With works ranging from folksy populism to serial constructs, aleatoric excursions, electronic musings and minimalist iterations, Foss had a talent for blurring the lines between seemingly disparate vocabularies, and not only among contemporary trends. Some of his better-known pieces transplant (decompose?) fragments of earlier music into modern soundscapes, such as Renaissance Concerto, for flute and orchestra (1985), and the orchestral Baroque Variations (1967), which--as if musical quotation were not tribute enough--includes a xylophone tapping out "Johann Sebastian Bach" in Morse code. Published in 1948, the composition of Foss's Capriccio for Cello and Piano dates from 1946, while he was the Boston Symphony's pianist under Serge Koussevitsky, with whom Foss had studied conducting during the summers from 1939 to 1943. Although the piece was composed for the famous cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, it is dedicated to the memory of Koussevitsky's first wife, Natalie, who had died in 1942. Even so, the rollicking piece is not an elegy but more a celebration of a life, and, in harmonies and gestures somewhat reminiscent of Copland's early ballets, it perhaps demonstrates just how "American" the new-citizen Foss had already become.