Music Library Association Notes, Vol. 67, No. 3 (March 2011), pp. 525-527
Elie Siegmeister, American Composer: A Bio-Bibliography.
By Leonard J. Lehrman and Kenneth O. Boulton.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. [xix, 456 p. ISBN 9780810869615. $75.] Illustrations, discography, bibliography, indexes.

Having published a monumental bio-bibliography of composer Marc Blitzstein only a few years ago, composer-pianist Leonard J. Lehrman has now coauthored with Kenneth O. Boulton another mammoth work of this kind, this one on composer Elie Siegmeister (1909-91). In the "biographical essay" that comprises a good portion of this book, the authors explain that Lehrman, a lifelong disciple who studied with Siegmeister prior to his work at Harvard and Cornell, at one point hoped to write a biography of the composer; and that Boulton, a pianist now on the faculty at Southeastern Louisiana University, planned on compiling a bio-bibliography. But after the Siegmeister estate refused access to the composeršs private correspondence at the Library of Congress, Lehrman and Boulton decided to work together. Apparently Boulton took principal responsibility for the annotated discography; Lehrman, for the biographical essay.

Widely known at one time, especially for his arrangements of folk songs, Siegmeister has become a rather forgotten figure, especially since his death. He never wrote that breakthrough work that might have firmly established his name. But if he no longer commands the position that he did in the 1940s, when Mitropoulos, Stokowski, and Toscanini championed his music, or even in the 1970s and 1980s, when Sergiu Comissiona, Cho-Liang Lin, and Lorin Maazel played his work, he continues to attract dedicated and skilled performers to his cause. A modest bibliography, including sympathetic endorsements by, among others, Nicholas Tawa and Carol Oja, has also accrued. And a number of his students, including not only Lehrman, but Michael Beckerman, Herbert Deutsch, and Daniel Dorff, maintain his legacy in various ways.

The 170-page biographical essay--more of a chronicle, really--that opens this tome forms a little monograph in itself, tracing Siegmeisteršs life chronologically, and concluding with summaries of related activities since his death. Siegmeister was born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants; his father was a pharmacist turned surgeon, while his older brother William, described by Elie as a "sun-worshipper, theosophist, biosophist, and God-knows-what, inventor of twenty different religions of his own," became a writer (p. 3). The whole family, unconventional in their politics and religion, seems to have been rather eccentric. After William established one of his "nature colonies" in Panama, mother Bessie, in her sixties, reportedly traveled twenty miles into the jungle on mule to find him there.

In the mid-1920s, Siegmeister, a pianist, studied composition with Seth Bingham at Columbia College, and privately with Wallingford Riegger. The discovery of Copland, in particular his Music for the Theatre, during this time came as a revelation. Siegmeister took the music's vitality to heart, if not its refinement. Indeed, the relationship with Copland became vexed over the years, possibly because Siegmeister could never shake the older manšs influence--as evident enough not only in his folkloric efforts, but such abstract pieces as the Theme and Variations #2 (1967), deeply indebted as it is to Copland's Piano Variations. He operated, in any case, very much in Copland's shadow. In the 1975 taped interviews that provide many of the quotations in this essay, Siegmeister described Copland as "a very limited composer" whose "material is thin, his emotion miniscule," a composer who in later years produced "terrible junk" (p. 6). Siegmeister seems to have been almost a little paranoid on the subject, suggesting that Copland was "envious" of him (pp. 85-86), and implying the presence of a sort of exclusionary gay or gay-friendly musical "ring" that included Thomson, Bowles, Diamond, Carter, and Bernstein (p. 34). Siegmeister's defensiveness--this time against the modernist establishment-- comes through in an anecdote about Leon Kirchner as well (p. 60).

Siegmeister pursued his studies with Nadia Boulanger for three years in the 1920s--he had unkind things to say about her, too--and then returned to New York, where he studied conducting at Juilliard. By this time, he had married the devoted Hannah Mersel, with whom he had three daughters, the first a brain-damaged child who eventually was institutionalized. In the early 1930s, he helped organized the Young Composers Group, a rough-and-tumble circle, including Bernard Herrmann and Jerome Moross, who happily substituted Ives for Copland as their spiritual mentor. He also joined the left-wing Composers' Collective, producing the labor song "Strange Funeral in Braddock" (1933; lyrics, Mike Gold), and became associated with the Communist Party, although he never joined up. This two-fold involvement with Ives and leftist politics, including a 1934 encounter with "Aunt" Molly Jackson, apparently drew him that much closer to both American folk and popular music (especially Gershwin), and he began to arrange folk tunes for both chorus and solo voice, eventually yielding the annotated Treasury of American Song with Olin Downes (New York: Howell, Soskin & Co., 1940) and the Joan Baez Songbook (New York: Ryerson Music Publishers, 1964). He also began to lecture and write about music, penning a Marxist history, Music and Society (New York: Critics Group Press, 1938), and editing an enormous compendium, The Music Lover's Handbook (New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1943).

Siegmeister made his living primarily by teaching, holding positions at Brooklyn College, the Downtown Music School, the New School, and eventually Hofstra, where he taught till 1976. His career, as mentioned, seems to have peaked in the 1940s with performances by leading conductors of such orchestral works as the Coplandesque Western Suite and the Gershwinesque Sunday in Brooklyn. In 1951, he completed a musical theater piece with Langston Hughes, whose words he set more than any other poet's. A successful Clarinet Concerto, somewhat reminiscent of Bernstein, followed in 1956. During these McCarthyite years, although he never renounced his liberal politics, he distanced himself from his leftist past, losing some friends in the process.

In 1958, he began collaborating with Edward Mabley, a favored librettist with whom he wrote the one-act The Mermaid in Lock No. 7 that year. In addition, Mabley arranged the words of Martin Luther King Jr. for the cantata I Have a Dream (1967), and adapted Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars as a three-act opera (completed 1969) that was performed at Louisiana State University in 1969 and presented in French at Bordeaux in 1970. In the meantime, daughter Nancy married pianist Alan Mandel, who eventually performed and recorded all five of the composer's piano sonatas.

In the 1970s, Siegmeister became an outspoken critic of the likes of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Cage, while approving the work of Albright, Bolcom, Colgrass, Corigliano, and Ligeti, among others. The Plough finally arrived in New York in 1979 to tepid reviews. In 1985, two one-act operas adapted by Mabley from stories by Bernard Malamud, Angel Levine and The Lady of the Lake, premiered. In 1989, "75 works of Elie's were played in 34 concerts in 24 cities" (p. 143). The composer died in 1991 of a brain tumor. On his deathbed, he maintained the seminal importance of The Rite of Spring and Porgy and Bess, and named among his own most significant achievements his Symphony No. 3 and The Plough. In 1999, the year of some centennial celebrations, Lehrman and his wife, soprano Helene Williams, started the Elie Siegmeister Society.

The above summary represents a somewhat arbitrary distillation of what is a very densely packed essay; reading through this narrative, it is easy to lose the forest for the trees. Indeed, some of this lengthy chronicle, especially toward the end, reads as much like a Lehrman memoir as a Siegmeister biography, so that at the least, students of Lehrman's own career will want to consult this book. (In regard to Lehrman's strong identification with Siegmeister, the latter once told him not to call him "father," saying, "I donšt want to get your Oedipal feelings switched to me, and it's too pompous anyway," p. 35.) Along these lines, the essay has a number of anecdotes and a certain informality--referring, for instance, to "Elie" and "Langston," as opposed to Siegmeister and Hughes--at some odds with formal scholarship. But the anecdotes have their own historical importance, and the essay's command of both musical and bibliographical sources is obviously authoritative.

Following the biographical essay come some photographs (mostly snapshots, although there are a few posed portraits); a catalog of Siegmeister's huge opus (including nine symphonies, six violin sonatas, and 159 songs) that lists not only "every known performance . . . and press article . . . about each individual work, with cross-referencing to the discography and videography" (p. x), but excerpts of reviews as well, including Paul Snook's rave of Alan Mandelšs recording of the sonatas in Fanfare ("a revelation," "phenomenal," etc., p. 315); books, articles, and letters, published and unpublished, by and about the composer; an alphabetical list of titles; an index of "co-creators"; and a more general index of persons and organizations.

This publication seems not as user-friendly as the Blitzstein bio-bibliography, itself a challenge to maneuver around, but which at least gathers most of its information in its chronologically organized catalog of works. Here, if someone is interested in researching a particular piece, especially without knowing the date of composition, one first has to locate it in the alphabetical list of works; find the numerical code and look that up in the catalog of works, organized by genre; and then consult more codes for discographical and videographical information. Moreover, no cross-referencing or indexing provides page references to the work in the biographical essay. Some of these difficulties, almost unavoidable given the number of works Siegmeister wrote, and the amount of information squeezed into the book's 456 pages, will be daunting for the casual user. On the other hand, serious scholars of Siegmeister's music no doubt will learn how to navigate the book quickly enough.

Whatever its limitations, this is, like Lehrman's Blitzstein bio-bibliography, a landmark in American music scholarship, a significant book, and one that deserves to be a part of any serious music library's collection.

Howard Pollack
University of Houston