Chapter 12 - Crisis and Resolution

Summary

The first few years of the 1970s turned out to be some of the most turbulent years of my time at the Eastman School, and I was deeply involved. The fiftieth year of the founding of the Eastman School was to be celebrated during the 1971-72 season. In early 1970, Walter Hendl called me and asked me to have lunch with him. As always it was a very pleasant and fruitful meeting of the two of us. He wished to discuss his plans for the anniversary season, and I was flattered that he wanted my opinion. First of all he suggested that the composi¬tion department come up with a list of composers to commission to write new works to be performed during the year by all of our ensembles. Providing some ideas himself. Then he told me that during that season he was going to conduct all the orchestral concerts. The commissioning project was the easiest to realize for two reasons: one, all the composers on the Eastman faculty, including those who were not in the composition department itself, would be commissioned, and he had some suggestions as to the kind of works he would like to see cre¬ated for the project. The other reason Hendl received great support for his suggestions was that his ideas of composers to commission outside the school were excellent.

I went back to my colleagues, and we divided up the list of works that Hendl wanted created for the anniversary, we divided them up between us and then gave the non-composition faculty members a chance to pick what they wanted to contribute. All of this went very smoothly and in the pro¬cess I picked the opportunity to write an organ concerto for my dear friend and colleague David Craighead and the Eastman Philharmonia. Many fa¬mous and not so famous outside composers were commissioned, Ameri-cans as well as European composers. Among the Americans were William Schuman, Peter Mennin, Vincent Persichetti, and Ned Rorem; among the Europeans, the most renowned one was Krzysztof Penderecki who was asked to write a work for harpsichord and orchestra. This work turned out to be the Partita, written especially for the anniversary and was to be pre miered by Felicja Blumental, a woman of Polish descent, but who made her reputation in North America and in Brazil.