Innovative, world-class events highlight School of Music's 'golden years' of 1950s and '60s

By Melissa Mitchell

The 100-year history of the UI's School of Music is
punctuated by the expected series of high and low notes. But
few associated with the school today would disagree that the
highest of the highs was the period spanning the end of
World War II through the 1960s.

Some refer to this period as the school's "golden age";
others say it was as close as it gets to Camelot.

In any case, "it was a very exciting time," said John
Garvey, an emeritus professor of music and former leader of
the Jazz Band and the Russian Folk Orchestra. Garvey came to
the UI in 1948 to fill the viola vacancy in the Walden
String Quartet, which soon earned an international
reputation for its performance of contemporary music by such
performers as Arnold Schonberg and Charles Ives. The music
school's new director, John Kuypers, brought the quartet
with him from Cornell University the previous year and
established it as the first musical ensemble of its kind to
be afforded full academic status at a major university.

Kuypers is remembered by Garvey and others as one of the
school's most effective directors, despite his short and
controversial tenure. During his directorship - from 1947 to
1950 - Kuypers reorganized the school's administration,
enhanced the string and orchestral programs, instituted a
music extension program and established the Summer Youth
Music program, supported the development of a serious opera
program, and encouraged performers and composers
experimenting in creative "new" music forms. Many of those
endeavors received continuing support throughout the '50s
and '60s by Kuypers' successor, Duane Branigan.

"A lot of things came about during the years of John
Kuypers; he did more for the school than any other person,"
said Austin McDowell, a long-time UI music professor and UI
alumnus who served first as associate director of the school
under Robert Bays, then as director for two years before his
retirement in 1988.

Unfortunately, in the process of implementing wide-scale
changes, Kuypers' style - considered authoritarian - ruffled
more than a few faculty feathers.

Contemporary and new music
--------------------------------
Among Kuypers' initiatives that had the most lasting impact
on the music school was his support of contemporary and new
music. That included his involvement in the UI's
Contemporary Festival of the Arts, an annual (and later,
biennial) series of events sponsored by the College of Fine
and Applied Arts. The festivals, which included a national
Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture,
began in 1948 and continued through 1971. The festivals
typically took place over the course of a month, and
included music, dance and theatrical performances held in
various campus venues, most notably in Smith Hall and the
Auditorium.

"International recognition came with the introduction of the
festivals," McDowell said. When the UI launched the event -
in large part, through the efforts of FAA deans Alan Weller
and Jack McKenzie - "schools weren't having festivals to
this extent," McDowell said. Among the well-known composers
and performers drawn to the campus to participate in the
festivals were Aaron Copland; Paul Hindemith; Georges
Enesco; Igor Stravinsky and his son, Soulima, who later
joined the faculty; and John Cage.

At the same time, the UI music school also was receiving the
approval of music critics from national newspapers and
magazines, who were drawn to the campus by the innovative,
world-class events taking place here. In her soon-to-be-
published history of the music school, "A Sympathy With
Sounds," Ann L. Silverberg cites a 1951 New York Herald
Tribune review that heaped praise on performances by Garvey,
Claire Richards, Stanley Fletcher and the UI's Percussion
Ensemble, conducted by Paul Price. Judging the festival as a
whole, critic Virgil Thomson observed: "Executions were in
all cases top quality, and the festival repertory seems a
broader coverage of contemporary music than has been
available in New York during a whole season."

In addition to performing with the Walden String Quartet,
Garvey played a pivotal role in the School of Music's
involvement in the festivals, serving as chairman of the
music events for about 15 years. Beginning in 1960, he also
contributed to the festivals as conductor of the dramatic
musical extravaganzas created by avant-garde faculty
composer Harry Partch. Although he was only on the faculty
for five years, Partch commanded considerable attention with
large-scale spectacles featuring his own specially made
wood, wire and glass instruments, which Garvey described as
"plectral or percussive" - that is, "instruments you pick or
hit."

Partch and others - notably the UI's Lejaren Hiller, a
chemist who eventually joined the music faculty and
established the school's Experimental Music Studios, and
John Cage, who visited the campus often during the 1950s and
early '60s - are credited with putting the UI on the map as
an internationally known incubator for the creation and
support of new music. Not everyone in the music school or
the UI community necessarily appreciated the work of these
composers, which bore little resemblance to the classical
Western-European musical foundations in which many of the
faculty were trained, Garvey noted.

"He's mad! He's mad!"
-----------------------
Probably the most legendary expression of distaste for the
emerging new music trends was an incident that occurred
during a 1965 festival performance of Hiller's "Suite for
Two Pianos and Tape." Appalled by the performer's near-
blasphemous act of pounding violently on a piano, the wife
of a classically trained faculty pianist began hurtling
music stands onto the stage.

Bruno Nettl, professor emeritus of ethnomusicology, arrived
at the concert at intermission, just in time to see the
woman being escorted from Smith Hall by police. Another
professor was calming her husband, who, Nettl said, wasn't
nearly so upset by the whole affair.

"The excitement was not only about the show, but was part of
the show," he said, adding that "you didn't really know if
the [woman's] gesture was intended to disturb the show, or
if it was to mean, 'Well, if anything goes...' "  At one
point during the same performance, Nettl said, "somebody
screamed, 'He's mad! He's mad!' I think it was she [the
music-stand-thrower]."

Nettl, who participated in the festivals solely as an
audience member, recalls another particularly notable
festival performance of new music in which Cage covered
himself with contact microphones attached to Smith Hall's
loudspeaker system, then proceeded to chop up an assortment
of vegetables. "Different vegetables sounded different,"
Nettl observed. After chopping the veggies, Cage placed them
in a juice blender, which, naturally, created an amplified
and obnoxious roaring sound. "Then, he drank the juice, and
you heard that, too," Nettl said.

Although the juice-drinking business and similar precursors
to today's performance art may not have been everybody's cup
of vitamins, such compositions gave everyone ample portions
of food for thought - and expression.

"All kinds of things were going on here at that time," Nettl
said, noting that "the main social life took place on the
streets. People would be gesticulating wildly outside Smith
and up and down Oregon and Nevada streets, where the school
had annexes in various houses."

Nettl added that "there was a little bit of political
correctness" in evidence among members of the university's
music and arts communities at the time. "You had to be
interested in 20th-century music to make a go of it," he
said.

McDowell, who plays the clarinet and chaired the school's
woodwind division for many years, noted that as a whole, the
faculty of the so-called golden era "respected our
traditional music, and at the same time, tried the new
things. Some members of the faculty wouldn't have anything
to do with it [the new music]," he said. "But the success
and exposure the school received satisfied most and was a
good route to take." Further, he said, the school's
commitment to new music dovetailed well with the
institution, since "a university is supposed to be
investigative."

Jazzin' it up
-------------
Although Garvey became involved in the investigative and
experimental aspects of new-music composition through his
association with Partch, he soon realized that his muse was
again pointing him in a different direction.

"Doing the Partch pieces reawakened the part of me that was
analogous to jazz - the part that involved expression of
emotion," Garvey said. That led to Garvey's founding of the
UI Jazz Band in 1960. At the time, the band was one of only
two in the country affiliated with a university.

During its first few years of existence, the jazz band
wasn't officially acknowledged by the School of Music.
Instead, it was sponsored by the Illini Union's student
foundation. "Only in the second or third year could we
rehearse in the music school," he said.

The band quickly earned the school's respect and acceptance
after it took top honors at the University of Notre Dame's
collegiate jazz festival in 1964 and placed first again in
1967, 1968 and 1969 at that and another national festival.
The band also was invited to perform at the Newport Jazz
Festival and made Downbeat magazine's charts in 1969 - both
atypical feats for a college band.

In addition to all the performance and composition
activities that brought the UI music school into the
national spotlight in the 1950s and '60s, a number of less
dramatic, but equally important, events were taking place
behind the scenes to boost the strength and reputation of
the school. Under Branigan's direction, the school greatly
expanded its graduate programs in music education,
strengthened its musicology faculty, and doubled the size of
its entire faculty. Branigan also made significant headway
toward acquiring new space for the school, which was
bursting at the seams as a result of post-World War II
expansion. In 1958, the bands division moved into new
headquarters in the Harding Band Building, and the director
laid the groundwork for the acquisition of new space for the
school in the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and
the Music Building.

The luster of the music school's golden age began to fade
somewhat around the time that the attention of the campus
and the nation was diverted by U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Since that time, various musical ensembles have come and
gone in the School of Music, and new ones have emerged.
Meanwhile, new faculty members - as well as a few members of
the old guard - continue to build on the school's tradition
for being a place where creativity and invention in
performance, composition and education are valued.

The glory years of the School of Music may be history, but
new - and different - chapters are still being written every
day. For instance, McDowell cited new strengths in such
areas as musicology and ethnomusicology.

The UI continues to be known for its support of new and
experimental music - particularly electronic music, McDowell
said. But "as a result of what started here, now it's more
commonplace ... now every school has its avant-garde
composers. You're out of it if you don't.

"The newness of the music itself is what made it in the
1950s and early '60s," McDowell said. "Now it's more
naturally accepted. You can't do much more that's new."