SOME REMARKS ON THE SYMPHONIES OF AVROHOM LEICHTLING

David Hackbridge Johnson

 

In a shrinking cultural space where the walls of the edifice in which one might be trapped seem to move ever closer together in an enactment of the standard fantasy trope of the ensnared hero – some of the walls have spikes to add a frisson of medieval torture – what hope is there for composers outside the merry-go-round of commissioning bodies and endowment funds who create out of compulsion – answering those inner imperatives of the Muse which seem to goad action and yet condemn the results of that action to silence?  Given that it is true to say that no one asks composers to operate in this way, achieving performances may be a matter of luck, self-advertisement, the finding of a champion, or the sheer bloody-mindedness to succeed – retiring types need not apply – yet with orchestras going bust, festivals being cancelled and an anti-cultural assault by the ignorant based on spurious accusations of elitism, the space for even the best composers is now more claustrophobic than ever.  Such a composer is Avrohom Leichtling, who by talent, perseverance and creative longevity surely merits exposure, yet whose music has yet to appear on CD or with any regularity on concert programmes. 

Given his invisibility on the recording and concert scene, Leichtling has resorted to the creation of sound files of a number of his works to give the merest idea of how they might impact if fully realised by the professional forces they deserve.  It was through a link to one of these files sent to me by Martin Anderson of Toccata Classics that I first heard Leichtling’s Symphony No. 7 written in 2002.  Despite the limitation of the notation software – its unbending, flat phrasing and somewhat garish sounds, especially in tutti passages – shining through at once was a compositional voice to be reckoned with.[i]  I was struck by the absolute certainty of structure and syntax in the music and its balance of emotive and technical elements. Rather than delivering a blow-by-blow account of the symphony it is more constructive to look at salient points or modes of compositional thought that occur in many of Leichtling’s works: harmonies have a coolness or openness associated with Copland – they tend to be slightly thicker and close-knit than Copland’s, melodic writing often conforms to arch-like shapes and has a flexibility redolent, perhaps, of hidden texts, ideas evolve in a way that is organic yet never sprawling – there is rather that interplay of motifs that form propulsive paragraphs which then accrue to make larger conglomerations.  Perhaps Leichtling’s most notable aspect is his contrapuntal ingenuity – the symphony in question positively bristles with polyphony that is spontaneous rather than formal – there are no obvious fugues or canon.  Exhilaration is the result – in the outer movements I was put in mind of Beethoven’s symphony of the same number – the orchestra is the same as Beethoven’s (with the addition of a harp) making me wonder if a tribute is meant.[ii]  The second movement of Leichtling’s 7th has the simplicity of a prayer which mounts to impassioned climaxes worthy to sit beside those of Bernstein in, say, the powerful first movement of his Symphony No. 2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’.  What pairs Leichtling and Bernstein most particularly, at least to this listener, is a melodic conception that is always vocal, a vocality of yearning, of searching and becoming – witness the return to simplicity at the end of Leichtling’s slow movement, but a simplicity that is subtly altered by having arrived somewhere else from where it started.  The third movement is an intermezzo as sometimes found in the music if Brahms.  The coolness of chord voicings with the harp much to the fore as a colourising influence is to be noted. The trio has the feel of a true trio in that, until larger forces interject, it contains passages for three instruments only: two bassoons and harp.  The last movement might well be another candidate for Wagner’s description of Beethoven’s 7th as ‘the apotheosis of the dance’.  Leichtling presents a relentless helter-skelter of darting ideas and dazzling counterpoint – an elated terpsichorean romp that if realised with live instruments must surely create a great stir.            

Leichtling’s Symphony No. 7 is part of a sequence of eleven works in the medium that span the years 1965 to 2021.[iii]  The composer has provided his own extensive survey of these works[iv] which reads both as an eloquent and revealing document of the working life of a composer and as an odyssey of trials and tribulations undergone in the hope of obtaining performances of the works in question.  Here for the sake of clarity is the list of Leichtling symphonies:

Symphony No. 1, Opus 35 (1965)

Symphony No. 2 (Sinfonia Concertante), Opus 41 (1966)

Symphony No. 3 (Symphony for Band), Opus 80 (1979)

Symphony No. 4 (Symphony for Two Chamber Orchestras), Opus 91 (1983)

Symphony No. 5, Opus 93 (1986)

Symphony No. 6 (Symphony for String Orchestra), Opus 103 (1998-2001)

Symphony No. 7, Opus 104 (2002)

Symphony No. 8, Opus 107 (2007)

Symphony No. 9 (for chorus and orchestra), Opus 117 (2011)

Symphony No. 10, Opus 125 (2014)

Symphony No. 11, Opus 145 (2020-2021)

 

At the time of writing only the 3th and the 5th of Leichtling’s symphonies has received a performance – the former was given by the Nutmeg Symphony Orchestra of Bristol, Connecticut[v] conducted by Marshall Brown in February, 2017, with the orchestra transmogrified into a wind band for the occasion – a premiere of a symphony 37 years after having been written.  The 5th was performed after an alarmingly short rehearsal time by Greater Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gustav Meier.  In relation to his symphonies Leichtling has written about ‘the vagaries of their non-performance, non-publication and non-recording’[vi]  The composer puts his neglect (and in so doing implies that he is not alone in being neglected) in the context of what he perceives as a decline from a high watermark of American culture that marked the immediate post-war years.  This spirit of enthusiasm for a distinctly American culture whose important artistic voices might include Copland, Ellington, William Schuman and Diamond in music, Miller, Odets and Sondheim in theatre, Ginsberg, Rich and Niedecker in poetry, and Rothko, Pollock and O’Keefe in painting – a richly inclusive list – is seen by Leichtling as dwindling to ‘a nameless, faceless, “all-inclusive” nihilistic dim shadow of its former self’[vii] with the Vietnam War taken as a watershed moment.  In light of ‘social and cultural dissolution and politically leftist decay’[viii] Leichtling and his wife became religiously observant at this time as a way to rediscover and recommit to former spiritual practices.  It is within this period of decline and retrenchment that Leichtling’s work might be seen – certainly he has remained true to traditions of compositional practice that eschew overtly modern gimmicks, the posturing amid popular aspects of the zeitgeist, or the polemics of personal politics.  In the 8th symphony there is a hidden programme related to the revelation of Mosaic Law, and in the 9th there are liturgical settings of some prayers for Shabbos morning – other than these works Leichtling’s symphonies are abstracted from overt extra-musical inspiration although these exist in the background as can be seen in the composer’s commentaries.  He is not a proselytiser of causes and his religious aspect is immutable rather than either a phase or special pleading for an egocentric spiritual status.

 

Rather than quoting the entire text of Leichtling’s own essay on his work, the purpose of this piece is to make initial remarks for listeners new to his oeuvre.  These remarks are restricted to those symphonies to be found on the composer’s YouTube page.[ix]  The aforementioned 3rd symphony is available on the page, not in its premiere performance under Marshall Brown but in a computer realisation.  It is a densely dramatic work that makes no appeal to the kind of popular pieces that make up the bulk of the wind band repertoire.  Leichtling also includes instruments not always standard in wind band instrumentation – a harp and a celeste are present.  The work is described by the composer as ‘dramatic and virtually cinematic throughout’[x]  One can certainly excite the inner visual sense by imagining a film of one’s own as the piece unfolds – its mood is distinctly that of film noir – that distinctly American mode of often nihilistic yet highly moral film making – although it took the French critic Nino Frank to spot it and name it as such.  Leichtling has not however given his own take on the great noir film scores by, say, Roy Webb (Murder My Sweet) or Arthur Lange (The Woman at the Window) – instead he has adopted a highly dissonant approach that he himself likens to Varèse, if not in direct syntax in its determinedly astringent sonic approach.  Highly chromatic lines weave through clusters of tuned percussion.  Fogs of lower brass creep along the bottom of canals.  A psychological torment might be glimpsed at the work’s violent climaxes.  This listener makes his own hallucination scene based on Philip Marlow’s drugging by the evil Dr. Sonderberg in Murder My Sweet.  As an antidote to high spirits and good humour Leichtling’s 3rd symphony ought to find a place in the repertoire of ambitious bands.

 

Prior to the commencement of Leichtling’s Symphony No. 6 (Symphony for String Orchestra) on the composer’s video of the piece, it is pleasing to have his spoken introduction.  The work is dedicated to the memory of fellow American composer Morton Gould (1913-1996).  An homage to Gould is most readily discerned in the second movement which Leichtling wrote as if imagining Gould were channelling the pizzicato movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.  Is this the only scherzo marked ‘in memoriam’?  It is certainly a wonderful tribute to Gould’s vibrant, eclectic voice and in so conceiving it Leichtling has done something remarkable: the movement really does suggest three composers having a three-way conversation – plucking at each other’s sleeves one might say.  This Gouldish scherzo, to use Leichtling’s splendid neologism, is a sheer delight for the listener too.  The first movement feels much more like an elegiac response to absence – a deeply mysterious slow movement marked Largo e tranquillo.  Leichtling calls this music ‘seemingly alien’; it was written in response to the Sonora Desert that surrounds Tucson, Arizona, which the composer explored in June 2000 whilst on a business trip.  The music unfolds as if a hot sun is arcing over the landscape and burning the scrub and cacti – music of stark stillness as sometimes found in the slow movements of Robert Simpson where that British composer is contemplating the stars.[xi]  Leichtling speaks of the ‘burning hot, glare filled sunrise in the desert southwest’[xii] and I can’t help thinking of those bleached bones in some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings.  Like O’Keeffe, Leichtling has populated the apparently barren landscape of the desert with scalding colours and with a sense of slowly churning and indifferent time; his approach makes the appearance of the scherzo that follows all the more shocking by contrast – here lies another example of that American eclecticism that abounds in Gould, Bernstein and others, and that goes all the way back to Charles Ives.  The finale creates another contrast – a baroque suite in one long movement with subtitles, passacaglia, fugue, siciliana, toccata and gigue.  Each section reveals another facet of string texture – a kaleidoscopic view, if you will.  The passacaglia ratchets up tension until the fugue bursts forth.  After a frenzied peak of energy the music winds down to the siciliana and Leichtling takes the opportunity to clear the tonal palette – we hear fresh quasi-baroque voicings and the lilting rhythm associated with the dance.  The toccata begins in a rustling hush of anticipation before the relentless semiquaver motion takes us to the realm of Bartok at his most propulsive – the finale of the Concerto for Orchestra comes to mind.  Headlong the music rushes into the gigue which is barbaric in the motoric manner of the third movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8.  Here Leichtling banishes the neo-baroque to a dusty annex and reveals a sound world punishing, extreme and thrilling.  String orchestras should step forward to the challenges proposed by this work.

 

With his Symphony No. 8, Avrohom Leichtling has created an epic of structural majesty and power that this listener has returned to many times.  The work presents a sound world of massive density with harmonies piled up over each other to create imposing edifices of often great dissonance.  As mentioned above there is a ‘programme’ to the symphony related to Mosaic Law, most specifically inspiration garnered from Sefer Devorim (The Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah).  However, the title page of the score is quite plain; only by way of a superscription on the first page of the score proper –  the opening sentence of Devorim/Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17 – is the listener to be alerted to an extra-musical stimulus.  Moshe’s (Moses’) message to the people at this juncture of the scripture is both a blessing and a curse; God’s law brings blessings if adhered to but a curse shall befall those who fall away from it.  The composer has stated that this programmatic element is not essential to an appreciation of the work but that knowledge of it may enhance the way the music is structured as related to the hidden text that drives the music.  Leichtling has written a masterpiece of both music and dare I say justicial commentary.  The path chosen is not easy and much is at stake – Leichtling has created music that radiates out of the implications of the law, in that perilous contrasts are made between episodes of calm, glittering colour and those of grinding, relentless intensity.  The internal struggle to live up to such ideals the law instantiates, is manifested in a score that bristles with brass-led complexity but can also bask in impressionistic washes of tuned percussion and flute.  The symphony makes a great arch of sound that upon completion gives a glorious view through itself into a world fabulously achieved.  The journey – musical, spiritual – might for some fulfil deep-seated needs for renewal and certainty.  For others it might strike them as one of the most powerful symphonic utterances of the last fifty years – it can sit alongside another neglected masterpiece of epic, Diamond’s Symphony No. 10 completed seven years before Leichtling’s 8th, and a work hardly performed.  Needless to say Leichtling’s work has not been performed at all.

 

With his Symphony No. 10, Avrohom Leichtling has given us a symphony that like his others is little content to spin out rehashes of previous works but shows the symphony in a new guise.  Its lyrical aspect is set out by a solo bassoon at the start and there is a divertimento quality to much of the writing – the composer’s textures and counterpoint are à point, as a chef might say of a stake.  This is not to deny the work dramatic power – there is plenty of that – but to suggest a composer at the top of his game whose technical gifts have become so malleable that they can be turned to any task.  There is a generosity of spirit to much of the music especially discerned in the many delicacies and glints of instrumental joie de vivre.  The composer writes how the work came about through a friendship with the musicologist Mark Thomas and their shared enthusiasm for the neglected German-Swiss composer, Joachim Raff.[xiii]  And I think some of Raff’s qualities come across in Leichtling’s symphony – the disarming ease with which happy ideas flow forth, the sure touch in orchestration that is deliberately lighter than that of the 8th symphony, and a sense of relaxation in the very mode of creation.  The composer sees the work as a kind of pastoral symphony and aligns himself with American composers who used that mode: Persichetti, Copland, Schuman, Mennin and Barber, as well as those rural-minded Europeans such as Vaughan Williams and Milhaud.  I shan’t bore the reader with a list of ‘best bits’ – the symphony can be readily enjoyed on the composer’s YouTube page.  I will say however that like the 6th symphony, the 10th has a most scintillating scherzo and that the beautiful finale that follows – marked Reminiscenze (Reminiscences) is a healing balm all the more precious for the rarity of such a manner in contemporary music.

 

This essay is but the briefest introduction to a handful of works from a list that runs to 160 opus numbers; I shall end it with an equally brief resumé of the composer.[xiv]  Leichtling did not come from a musical family.  There was a Russian uncle, Monya Berg who was a violinist and a friend of David Oistrakh but apart from this distant link there was only music at Thanksgiving dinners.  The first composer that Leichtling really noticed was Bernard Herrmann and the film composer – his concert work is still rather neglected – has remained important to Leichtling throughout his life.  Failed attempts to master stringed instruments via ‘a variant form of Suzuki methodology’[xv] did not mean that Leichtling was unmusical, on the contrary, at an early age he was fascinated by the notes on the page and how they related to sound.  By the time he entered Junior High School he knew he would be a composer – he had already acquired scores of Stravinsky’s as Le Sacre du Printemps, Florent Schmitt’s La Tragedie de Salome and Copland’s Third Symphony and the composer Allan Blank took an interest in the young student.  He took clarinet lessons with Charles Schiff and took up the conducting of school ensembles.  Leichtling studied at The High School of Music and Art and from thence he went to The Juilliard School where he studied with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions for seven years.  In the summer of 1966 he studied with Darius Milhaud at Aspen.  Leichtling made a conscious decision to align himself with an American tradition as represented by William Schuman and Peter Mennin, both of whom were prominent at Julliard.  In the 1960s there was a concerted move by the school towards an appreciation of the avant-garde work of Berio, Stockhausen and Carter.  Whilst not averse to conducting such ‘advanced’ music with pleasure, Leichtling’s own work stemmed from a different source – he has stated ‘I view myself as an American composer with all that implies’.  A key concept about style formation was learned from Persichetti who ‘always stressed the concept of amalgamation as the key to individual style’.  Persichetti’s own style can be said to be based on an open eclecticism – Leichtling speaks of his many ‘faces’, and it is easy to see how Leichtling has followed this example whilst at the same time always remaining essentially himself.  At Julliard, Leichtling achieved the following degrees: Bachelor of Music (1968), Master of Science (1969), and Doctor of Musical Arts (1971); he was one of the first at Juilliard to be awarded the Doctorate.  Mention must be made of the great libraries that Leichtling had as his disposal; he eagerly borrowed scores from the stacks of the 58th Street Music Library, the Juilliard library at The Joseph Patelson Music House.  He made a particular study of the music of Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Hugo Weisgall.[xvi]  In terms of performances of his music, Leichtling would seem to be right from the start of his career one of the unluckiest of composers; Persichetti, Mennin, Schuman and Stokowski all perused his large-scale Symphony No. 1, written under the heady influences of Vaughan Williams, Hermann, Dorati, Schuman and Walton, yet Julliard policy at that time was never to perform student works.  Stokowski was impressed enough to commission another symphony on a more manageable scale.  Although this was slated for the 1968-1969 season nothing came of the relationship with the now agéd maestro and the work was not performed.  There are many other ‘nearly’ moments of a similar nature in the career of Avrohom Leichtling.  One only has to mention the disgraceful behaviour of a certain conductor of the New Orleans Symphony, who, after having agreed to do the symphony not in the end taken up by Stokowski, without warning rescheduled the rehearsal and then threw the score in the face of the composer when he haplessly turned up for the last thirty seconds of the rehearsal, to give an idea of the baffling attitude Leichtling has been unlucky enough to encounter.  The composer was however able to take up teaching posts at Grinnell College, Iowa, where he worked on the Piatigorsky recording archive, and at East Carolina University’s School of Music, where he was Professor of Composition and Theory from 1978.  Startlingly, his Symphony No. 3 (the one for wind band mentioned above) was commissioned by the university but never performed due to internal politics and even the hearsay suggestion of anti-Semitism.  Leichtling left ECU after three years and whilst looking for another professorship undertook work as a night manager of a 24-hour restaurant.  Eventually positions were potentially forthcoming from University of North Carolina at Winston-Salem, the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and, in 1984 Columbia University in New York City but each job was scotched either by Leichtling’s being over-qualified or in circumstances that can only be described as farce.  After these attempts at remaining in academe, the composer took a job in tele-sales.  Other sagas unfolded over commissions not ultimately performed or works sent to conductors and simply ignored.  As the composer says, he heard ‘Gornicht’ – Yiddish for nothing.

 

It would seem dispiriting to leave off the writing of this essay at a low point, yet thankfully Avrohom Leichtling has now completed a number of computer-assisted renditions of his scores that must be a first stage to a wider appreciation of his music.  His compositional voice is varied, vital, not always for the faint-hearted but always searching and creative with a sense of a challenge surmounted.  Hopefully it will not be long before others take up that never shirked challenge.  His music is urgently deserving of performance.  

            

      

  

 

 

 

         

 

         

 


[i] It should be said at once that Leichtling has worked particularly hard on these files and they are far superior to those of many other composers.  His scores are immaculately produced using Sibelius notation software so there are no impediments to be surmounted in order that his music be performed other than those posed by the technical expertise required.

[ii] Other modern symphonies that use a Beethovenian orchestra and seem to reflect on the 7th are Robert Simpson’s Symphony No. 2 and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Symphony No. 4 (although the latter seems perhaps even closer to the 4th of Sibelius).

[iii] There is an earlier unnumbered symphony for band dating from 1963 entitled Sinfonia Microcosma Opus 19 which the composer describes as ‘really more a suite of short, unrelated pieces than anything else, complete with a title having been “adapted” from the series of brief, didactic piano works of Béla Bartok (1881-1945) (Mikrokosmos).’  See, Avrohom Leichtling, The Saga of an American Composer and his Eleven Symphonies, published by the composer, p. 4.

[iv] Leichtling, Op. cit.

[v] Bristol is in Hartford County to which the present writer made a visit with the Sutton Schools Orchestra in 1977.  I wonder if Avrohom Leichtling spotted our joint concerts with local Connecticut ensembles.  Apart from flamboyantly, if inaccurately, leading the second violins, I remember the trip for the many times I was asked by locals to pronounce ‘Connecticut’ in very precise ‘English’ English, each time followed by enthusiastic applause.

[vi]Ibid. p. 51.

[vii] Ibid. p. 1.

[viii] Ibid. p. 1.

[ix] This can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@composer613/featured - (accessed 19.xi.2023)

[x] Introductory essay to the YouTube video.

[xi] I am thinking especially of the icy stillness that pervades the opening tranquillo of Simpson’s String Quartet No. 7 which he dedicated to the astronomer Sir James Jeans.

[xii] Ibid. p. 33.

[xiii] Leichtling has written over a dozen essays on Raff, mainly for CD booklets.

[xiv] I am grateful to the composer for the information in this section relayed through email communications.  I am particularly happy that he was able to expand eloquently on my simplistic questions put to him in the form of an email interview.

[xv] From the email interview, as are subsequent quotations in this section.

[xvi] I can’t help but share my similar experience of score-borrowing in my youth thanks to the incredible stacks at the libraries of Sutton, Wallington and Carshalton, where shelf after shelf was filled with not only the standard classics in their yellow Eulenberg covers but the latest works by Simpson, Birtwistle and Boulez, together with a healthy array of late-romantic British music by the likes of Bax, Ireland and Bliss.  Most-borrowed were the blue-covered editions of Havergal Brian symphonies published by Musica Viva.  These libraries are now shells of their former selves and contain no music scores – the whole stock being offloaded and/or dumped in a tip in the 1990s and early 2000s – indeed, most of the libraries are no longer libraries at all but ‘hubs’ providing internet access and coffee.  It was inconceivable in the 1970s when I was starting out as a composer that we as a family could afford to buy what were expensive publications and the demise of these once great collections which provided the chance to study and learn regardless of income level is a shameful episode in British social history, gross in scale.