Brandeis Magazine

According to composer Steven Mackey, GSAS PhD’85, you could grow up in California’s Central Valley in the 1960s and ’70s without hearing a single note of classical music. “The closest I came were the soundtracks to the Tom and Jerry cartoons,” he says.

During his teenage years, his musical diet consisted of rock and blues. “I was particularly interested in that tight fusion of philosophy, zeitgeist, protest, and transcendence we called psychedelic rock,” he says.

In a music appreciation course at the University of California, Davis, Mackey, a physics major, discovered the sounds of Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky. “This is the most psychedelic rock music I’ve ever heard,” he thought. “This is music that takes you on a trip.”

One day soon after, driving around Sacramento with his brother, Mackey listened to Beethoven’s last string quartet. He remembers the second movement as “this little singsong tune, and then it hit this wrong note, and the rhythm collapsed, and everything fell apart. It literally knocked the wind out of me.”

He decided he wanted to write music like that.

After earning a master’s degree in music from Stony Brook University, Mackey came to Brandeis to study composition with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Donald Martino and composer Martin Boykan, famous for his ability to inspire students. He says he can still picture Boykan seated at a piano in a seminar, holding a cigarette between his pinky and ring finger while expertly playing a complicated score.

Mackey says the “sense of groove and beat and energy of rock music” in his body began to merge with all the learning in his head. Embracing both, he began composing works. The fusion of rock and classical music became his signature sound.

In the decades since Brandeis, Mackey has composed and performed in works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, and opera, many of them commissioned by orchestras around the world. He has taught composition at Princeton University since 1985, served as director of the New Jersey Symphony’s Edward T. Cone Composition Institute, and recently joined the faculty of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.

Critics have called him “one of America’s most imaginative composers” and characterized his works as “finely crafted and touchingly sincere,” “trippy, dazzling, daffy,” and “major additions to the contemporary literature.”

Mackey is just one in a long list of highly accomplished, critically acclaimed alumni and faculty of Brandeis’ music composition program. In 1949, when Erwin Bodky, a German American music scholar and an expert on Bach’s keyboard music, was hired as the first faculty member in the university’s music program, he wrote, “Brandeis must create the very finest musical education, else it is better that we do not start.”

Bodky need not have worried. Within a year, he had gained two faculty colleagues who were in the pantheon of American music makers: composer/conductor Irving Fine, the founding director of Brandeis’ School of Creative Arts, and Aaron Copland, widely heralded as the dean of American composers.

Then, in 1951, President Abram L. Sachar, H’68, traveled to western Massachusetts, where rising star Leonard Bernstein was conducting the New York Philharmonic at the Tanglewood Music Center. Sachar asked Bernstein if he would join the ranks of Brandeis’ music faculty, even though, Sachar admitted, the fledgling university didn’t have a music facility — or any instruments. Undaunted, Bernstein accepted. He taught classes in modern music, opera, and composition at Brandeis from 1951-56.

At the end of Bernstein’s first year, to celebrate the graduation of the inaugural class, he and Fine organized the Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, for which Sachar had given them carte blanche. The weeklong extravaganza, which garnered national attention for Brandeis, featured music, opera, theater, poetry, and dance by artists who included Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Lotte Lenya, Miles Davis, William Carlos Williams, Merce Cunningham, and Igor Stravinsky. Many of the performances were premieres.

The event, which has been held annually ever since, today bears Bernstein’s name.

For 75 years, music education at Brandeis has maintained the heady standards and high altitude of the early days. The music department’s star-studded faculty roster has featured composer Harold Shapero, who established the university’s electronic music studio in 1961, making Brandeis an early proponent of the art form; composer and critic Arthur Berger; Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet; and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner.

More recently, composers Eric Chasalow, the Irving G. Fine Professor of Music; David Rakowski, the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition; Yu-Hui Chang, GSAS PhD’01, the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Music; and professor of music Erin Gee have each won Guggenheims, along with a host of other prestigious awards and commissions. Chasalow’s papers have also joined those of Copland, Bernstein, and Fine in the collection of the Library of Congress.

And Brandeis has nurtured scores of students who have enjoyed illustrious careers as composers, such as Irving Fine’s students Henri Lazarof, GSAS MFA’59, and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wernick ’55; experimental composer Alvin Lucier, GSAS MFA’60; and Grawemeyer Award winner Peter Lieberson, GSAS PhD’85.

Since 1980, the Lydian String Quartet has been an integral part of music composition at Brandeis, premiering and recording music by faculty and graduate-student composers, placing their work alongside compositions by prominent historical and contemporary composers.

The Lydians occupy a special place in Mackey’s heart. “I owe them my career,” he says. As a Brandeis student, Mackey would take a pillow to the Slosberg Music Center, lie down, and listen to them rehearse. He felt a deep affinity with the foursome: They were his own age and, like him, were “music nerds from the time they were kids.”

By then, he was starting to feel less like a student and more like a real composer. He wrote an ambitious piece for the Lydians, which they played at the Naumburg Chamber Music Awards competition. The quartet won, and went on to perform the piece at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, in Los Angeles. The Concord String Quartet heard the broadcast of that performance and commissioned Mackey to compose a piece for them. This, in turn, led to a commission for the Kronos Quartet, who took Mackey with them on a world tour.

This year, three of Mackey’s works have had their world premieres, including “Concerto for Curved Space,” performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Andris Nelsons conducting. Just before the BSO premiere, Mackey greeted the Symphony Hall audience. “This is a dream come true” he told them, describing how important his time as a graduate student at Brandeis had been to his career.

Sometimes experimental, always unconventional, Mackey’s work has enriched the canon of contemporary music with truly original sounds. “And it all started,” he says, “with those naps I took in the Lydian rehearsal studio.”

Sarah Church Baldwin is a freelance writer living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.