http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-01-31/arts_feature.html
65 years after writing it, Kent Kennan gets to hear his prize-winning
composition played in concert
I Hear a Symphony
BY JERRY YOUNG
January 31, 2003:
Credit seldom goes to good counterpoint.
You can't hum it or tap it out on a table. But often counterpoint is
the intangible ingredient that makes millions of folks bond with a Beethoven
symphony, a Duke Ellington masterpiece, or a Sting album. It separates
Mozart from Salieri, Beethoven from Hummel, the Beatles from the Dave Clark
Five.
Kent Kennan is a master of counterpoint. His book on the subject has
been the standard text for more than four decades, and he has a succinct
definition when new acquaintances ask what counterpoint is.
"The art of combining two or more voices in a musically satisfying
way."
His definition would be incomplete if one word were removed.
His other book, The Technique of Orchestration, has been the
standard since 1952. They are two books that music students don't sell back
at the end of the semester. Austin Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Bay
kept his copy of The Technique of Orchestration from his student days at the
Peabody Conservatory. "I refer to it all of the time," he says.
"It is almost unheard of for a textbook to have that kind of life,"
says Donald Grantham, Kennan's colleague at the UT School of Music and
co-author of the latest revision of The Technique of Orchestration. "In high
school and at the university I used both of these books. They were the
standard texts in grad school, and they are still used today."
Kennan, the composer, writer, and educator, has been an essential
voice in America's musical counterpoint since 1936 when he won the Prix de
Rome Composition Prize, in part for a symphony he wrote as an undergrad at
the Eastman School of Music.
He never heard it performed. In 1939, his teacher, Howard Hanson,
conducted it with the Eastman Rochester Orchestra, but Kennan was in
residence at the American Academy in Rome. Hanson sent him recordings on
crude aluminum discs, from which Kennan could tell very little. He will
finally get a chance when Bay conducts the Austin Symphony in the second
movement of the three-movement work at its concert this weekend.
Bay planned to present the work in April as a 90th-birthday
surprise, but health made scheduling an issue. Last year Kennan began
preparing friends for his decision not to undergo dialysis, which he knew
was inevitable. It was the same choice fellow Austinite James Michener made
in 1997.
"The actual dialysis is nothing to worry about," said Kennan, who
had two treatments. "I would consider it if you could go in for five minutes
and come out. I had to go three times a week for four hours each. I had
thought I could while away some of the time by sleeping, but it was too
noisy. I thought I might read, but I am not sure in those surroundings. I
didn't think it was worth it to do this for the rest of my life just so I
would feel a little better when I was 91."
Despite a family grounding in public affairs -- Kennan's father was
a lawyer and his half-brother is writer and diplomat George Kennan, who
largely designed American policy toward the Soviet Union in the Truman
administration -- Kennan made music his career. After returning from Rome in
1939, he began to teach and joined the music faculty at the University of
Texas in 1940. He left two years later for the war, serving as a bandsman
and then a band leader with the Army Air Corps but in 1949 came back to UT,
where he earned a reputation for being fair and always meticulous.
"I remember seeing some of his graded assignments, and I was amazed
at the effort and time he put into them," said Grantham. I was one of his
students in the Seventies, two semesters of counterpoint and two of
orchestration, and I have kept the orchestration and counterpoint that he
graded. They are a lesson in good editing, deftly mixing encouragement with
Kennan's trademark skull and crossbones, which would appear whenever you
sent an instrument out of its range or committed one of counterpoint's
cardinal sins: parallel fifths or octaves.
Kennan's towering musical gifts had a way of humbling his students
-- to illustrate a musical point, he often would open up a full orchestral
score at the piano and play it up to speed, transposing the clarinet, horn,
and trumpet parts on the fly -- but the man was humble himself, and in an
often divided faculty, he played the peacemaker.
"He always tried to do what was right for the students and the
department," said Dr. John Grubbs, retired musicology professor and dean of
the graduate school. "He was mild-mannered, but he always spoke his mind.
The department had so many different disciplines, and the faculty had
different agendas, but he was always able to see the big picture. He made
you feel like part of a family."
And he is a sly wit. A call from Kennan always ends with a joke
(invariably off-color) that leaves you snorting. Yet he is ever sensitive of
that passing notion of mixed company. At the end of an orchestration class,
he mysteriously dismissed the women so he could tell the men that the
descending violin glissandi in Richard Strauss' Til Eulenspiegel's Merry
Pranks represented Til pissing out the courthouse window.
Unfortunately, Kennan's duties as a teacher and administrator left
him little time for composition. And the shift in tastes toward Arnold
Schoenberg's 12-tone system provided an additional disincentive. He didn't
compose for almost 30 years.
Despite the many performances, recordings, and awards, and the
countless composers who proudly claim him as their mentor, Kennan is
pessimistic about composing as a profession. "It is a real question whether
anybody should undertake a serious career in composition. It isn't that
people hate us, they just don't know we are here. We are writing in a
vacuum."
Still, after his retirement in 1983, Kennan again found his musical
voice. One of his biggest successes was his reworking of Prokofiev's Op. 94
Flute Sonata, originally arranged for violin and piano; Kennan turned it
into a clarinet sonata in 1984 and into a concerto for clarinet and
orchestra in 1986. In the hands of clarinetists such as Richard Stoltzman
(who played it with the Austin Symphony in 1997 and recorded it for RCA),
the work quickly gained a firm hold in the repertoire, alongside his 1936
Night Soliloquy for Flute and Orchestra. Night Soliloquy is known to every
professional flute player; Peter Bay played it when he was studying flute.
It puts Keenan in a small handful of Americans (along with Sousa and
Gershwin) to have had a work conducted by Toscanini.
Stoltzman recognized Kennan's brilliance in brevity in his Prokofiev
transcription. "I've asked people to transcribe things, and it is not as
easy as it seems," Stoltzman told me before his 1997 performance with ASO.
"Kennan's transcription is so simple and very tastefully done, and it sounds
like Prokofiev. That takes more than a knack; it takes a gift."
Throughout his career, Bay has championed American music, but he
credits the idea of Keenan's birthday surprise to friend and fellow American
music enthusiast Karl Miller, the rare recordings archivist at the UT Fine
Arts Library. Miller's record label, Pierian Records, will release a CD of
Kennan's chamber music this spring.
"About 10 years ago, I talked to Kent about the symphony," Miller
said, "and he sat at the piano and played parts of it. He had not heard it
since Hanson had sent him those scratchy aluminum discs." Miller discovered
that the Eastman Rochester archives still had a copy of that recording
Kennan had tried to listen to more than 60 years ago. Miller got a copy, and
he made CDs for Kennan and for Bay, and suggested it to Bay for the symphony
to play. "He prefaced giving me the CD by telling me that Kent was not very
positive about it because he did not think much of it," Bay said.
"When they first suggested it, I said no," Kennan said. "It was
written when I was an undergraduate at Eastman. It is an homage to Hanson,
which means the little blue-haired ladies will like it."
Bay took Kennan's reluctance with a grain of salt. "It is a very
fine piece. It is young Kent Kennan, but so what? We listen to Stravinsky's
first symphony and appreciate it for what it is. A good piece, even if it
doesn't sound like his mature music. But I didn't know Kent well enough to
presume he would be OK with a public performance of it, so I put it off.
Karl was good enough to remind me that his 90th birthday was soon
approaching and suggested it as a surprise birthday tribute; I thought it
was a very fine suggestion."
Kennan returns Bay's respect and affection. "I am just delighted
over Peter Bay, and this is not a quid pro quo," Kennan said. "We have
finally matched the conductor with the orchestra."
Bay reports that Kennan has stopped his protestations about his
piece of musical juvenilia. "When I called him about two weeks ago, I was
happy that he sounded positive about this presentation of the symphony. He
seemed to have brightened his spirits a bit, and he had something positive
to look forward to. That meant the world to me. I am expecting him at the
rehearsal, and I need him at the performance."
Kennan is feeling better than expected, but has begun to see the
signs the doctors described to him. He is at peace and happy to be hearing
from countless old friends and former students, who share the feeling that
Kennan's voice will be conspicuous in its absence. "I'm still here. I
suppose I am falling apart a little bit day by day, but it hasn't gotten to
the panic stage yet."
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---- The Austin Symphony Orchestra will perform the second movement of a 1936 symphony by Kent Kennan on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, 8pm, in Bass Concert Hall. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----Copyright C 1995-2003 Austin Chronicle Corp. All rights reserved.
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