Tamara Brooks (1941-2012)

Photo by Jeff Thiebauth (http://jefftphoto.com/). Used with permission.

Yesterday morning, I heard the devastating news that choral conductor Tamara Brooks died of a heart attack, at the age of 70.

After Joe Maneri, Tamara was the most inspiring, and most musical, musician that I ever encountered at New England Conservatory.  She was the real deal, the genuine article, a person whose deep passion for music was never spoiled by the world.  

She started at NEC the same time I did, September of 1989.  She came at an unenviable time in certain ways.  The legendary Lorna Cooke deVaron formed the NEC Chorus in 1947 and directed it till her retirement 41 years later.  During a one-year interim period, Lorna's replacement was sought.  The word was that no less than Joseph Flummerfelt was to come to NEC.  Negotiations were at a rather late stage, late enough that a salary (in the six figures) was already decided upon.  However (as the story goes), he insisted that all voice majors, not just undergrads, be required to take Chorus.  The voice faculty had a fit, and Flummerfelt walked away from the deal.  Tamara was, in effect, the "second choice." (To what extent she knew, or felt, that, I don't know.)

An obituary described Tamara as "firey."  I don't know if "firey" really captures it.  Sure, she was passionate.  But there was something elemental about her musicality.  If the writer meant "firey" as "like fire," I'll buy it.  But she was also like water, like earth, like air.  Maybe from a technical standpoint one could quibble with her.  Her beat was not always clear.  She did little if any vocal coloration — she wasn't one to talk about vowels.  She regarded everyone in that large chorus as a musician.  "You're all soloists!" she exclaimed one day.  Sometimes we sounded that way.  However, there's only one kind of good educator: an inspiring educator.  If she was one thing, she was inspiring.  She was a spring of anecdotes about great composers and conductors and performers — anecdotes that were always pertinent to music.  It wasn't just raconteurism for its own sake.  Like Joe Maneri, she was from New York, therefore she knew everybody who was anybody (perhaps even more so, because she studied at Juilliard).  Also like Joe Maneri, her stories were not only profoundly musical but profoundly human.  One day she said, with tears in her voice, "I still haven't accepted the fact that Vincent Persichetti died."  And she spoke of a musician, utterly unknown, utterly unschooled, utterly self-taught, who lived and made music in Cyprus.  "He was the greatest musician I ever knew," she said.  The fact that she so highly regarded this un-prestigious musician, solely on the basis of his innate musicality, was so foreign to the goings-on at the Conservatory. It immediately reminded me of a similarly unknown/unschooled/self-taught Italian priest whom I knew, Don Antonio Simioni, whose music touched me in a similar way.  I never told Tamara that, but I took great comfort in knowing that, had I told her, she would have understood perfectly.

 

The piece Tamara chose for that first year was Brahms's Requiem. I remember so many things about the experience.  Because Tamara was only about the music, the rehearsals were only about the music.  They were outrageously inspiring.  She also could be brilliantly funny.  In the sixth movement there was the phrase "kleine bleibende Statt."  She declared, in a put-on Teutonic accent, "Put more Vibratt on the Statt!"  Of course, that she would even ask for such a thing from a chorus shows how unorthodox she dared to be.  I also remember her time management.  The fourth movement was at concert-level in late September, while parts of the sixth movement were being look at for the first time in January, one week before the concert. 

But what a concert it was!  Life-changing, unforgettable! At the warm-up rehearsal in Jordan Hall, she conducted in a calm, controlled way.  She said she was saving it for the concert and wanted us to do the same.  I remember that the harpist was inexperienced playing with orchestra.  Tamara said to us in the chorus, "I might be conducting only the harp during this passage."  She was attentive to individual students' needs and could accommodate them in a way that was never belittling.  Again, it was only about the music.

It came time for the concert to begin.  She had deliberated which piece to pair with the Brahms.  She chose Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture.  I heard it from the hall.  She made the hackneyed music sound fresh, as if I'd never heard the piece before.  And I still remember the flutist saying to me afterwards, "She was wonderful.  She actually explained the music to us."  

After the Mendelssohn, the choir met in Brown Hall.  She gave us a short pep talk, telling us (convincing us?) how well-prepared we were.  Then she did the most inspiring thing she could have done.  She read a passage from a biography of Brahms, quoting a contemporary of the composer.  The room was nearly silent.  I don't know if anyone else felt transported in time, but I did.  We filed up to Jordan Hall and sang the Brahms.  

Tamara was the opposite of what she had been in the warm-up.  Her passion filled the stage.  She was so musical that we felt it was safe to be so, ourselves.  At the end, at the final "Selig"'s, the harp was playing, and the chorus was singing their F's and A's, and Tamara, who was 50, looked about 20.  I was not the only chorister to notice it.  Her face was transfigured. 

After the concert I was in another world.  I remember walking down Hemenway St., singing parts of the Requiem at full voice, without realizing it was full voice. 

A few days later, in my mailbox at school, was a hand-written thank you note from Tamara.  This was remarkable for two reasons.  Not only did she take the time to thank every individual chorister (and probably also instrumentalist), but the stationery itself was decorated by hand.  Each piece of paper had these flowers, done with several color markers or calligraphy pens.  No two pieces of paper had the same design.  Probably she whipped them off pretty quickly.  Still, I could not believe that she would give me, an undistinguished inhabitant of the back of the bass section, a hand-written AND hand-designed thank you note.

I left NEC and returned two years later.  This year, Tamara chose a different requiem: Verdi's.  The voice department almost had a stroke.  They tried to prevent Tamara from doing the piece and causing such laryngeal stress upon their students.  Tamara prevailed, but I imagine it took its toll on her. 

The rehearsals were as inspiring as the Brahms rehearsals two years before.  Tamara conducted from a facsimile of the manuscript, and from time to time she would exclaim things like, "In your score there are three p's.  In mine, Verdi writes SEVEN p's!", or, "In your score it says, 'senza misura.' In mine, Verdi writes, 'senza tempo'!"

I didn't sing in the concert, as I'd left school a few weeks before.  I did attend one of the orchestral rehearsals, at which Tamara was both the interpreter and the educator.  In a certain passage there was an interplay between the viola and clarinet that Tamara thought was very unique.  She had the violists and clarinettists play it and made everyone else in the orchestra stop and listen.  I don't think any of the orchestral conductors took such pains to inspire and educate.

I attended the concert, which I don't think I fully appreciated at the time.  The tenor and bass sections were not strong enough, the voices being too young and too small in number.  However, Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe waxed poetic, declaring that Brooks's performance was "the clear winner in this season’s Verdi Requiem contest." There were two other Verdi Requiems during that same three-month interval in 1992, one by Ben Zander and the Boston Philharmonic, and another by Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony.  Dyer called Tamara's performance a "sublime, spiritual experience," adding, 

everything was drawn out of the music and the situations it depicts and embodies; nothing was superimposed. And this made every moment of it profoundly original…Everyone sang within what they had and with the purpose of personal expression.  Though there were plenty of soaring climaxes, this wasn’t a blow-out Verdi Requiem; it spoke to humanity’s most intimate fears, hopes, and confidences, and it compelled the active participation of the audience’s feelings, too. More than once I wept.

One of the greatest lessons I ever learned from Tamara occurred in a rehearsal, either in '89 or '91.  She was talking about tempo in general.  She said that tempo had to be chosen according to harmony.  She went to the piano and played Chopin's Aeolian Harp etude at a rather brisk tempo.  She then played either a Bach chorale or Chopin's C-minor prelude (I no longer recall which), placing each chord deliberately, almost forcing us to hear the color of each harmony. 

Hankus Netsky got it right when he said, 

Tamara was incredibly dynamic, charismatic, energetic, a vortex of passion, love, and talent.  When she got excited about something, there was no stopping her. And she got excited about a lot of things. When that happened, she was 100% there and never imagined that her students or others might not be as excited about a project as she was.

I leave you with a YouTube clip of Tamara conducting Victoria's O Magnum Mysterium.  You don't see a lot of her in the video.  But you can hear the shaping and the humanity.  In these respects she was inimitable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6iNnF7wKko

 

A Year Without Joe Maneri

Yesterday, August 24th, marked a sad anniversary: one year since the world was deprived of the life of Joe Maneri.

Joe left the world a more impoverished place and left a hole in my life that could be patched but never filled. But despite Joe's departure (or because of it? It would be like him to be pulling some strings Up There!), the riches that have appeared in my life this past year have been astonishing. Indeed, as I looked back, I had to stop and think, "Did all that really happen within 365 days?"

A year ago I was unemployed. Now I have two jobs, each one a "dream job" in a completely different way. MIT and Christ Lutheran Church in Natick, Massachusetts – two remarkable places with remarkable clergy and remarkable potential both to use the skills I already have and to stretch myself to develop new skills. I wasn't the first person in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church to note that denomination's knack for mystery and deceit where truth and honesty are instead appropriate. I prayed to find a job where (a) the boss was honest; and (b) I could use my gifts. I found not one but two such appointments. The hardest part has been to convince myself that I'm actually working, such has been my happiness in these two positions.

The relationships I have forged with people this past year have been equally remarkable. I have friends that I cannot believe I have known less than one year. They "get me" in a way that I've rarely been "gotten."

And then there's the small matter of a baby named Matteo Giovanni Ciampa. He is my third child, my wife's first. At 3.5 weeks of age, he at times behaves like an infant weeks, if not months, his senior. It's too early to tell if he will have a sense of humor, but if he goes in the direction of his two older brothers, I can soon expect hilarity in triplicate. (Sometime this past year, I asked my three-year-old, Federico, "Are you the best boy in the whole world?" He replied, "Flattery will get you nowhere.")

I telephoned Sonja Maneri on this sad anniversary. She shared with me a poem that has been helping her get through these difficult days:

NOT IN VAIN
by Emily Dickenson

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain:
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Neither Joe nor Sonja have lived in vain. In fact, between them they have patched more breaking hearts and eased more pain than a squadron of theologians.

The Antonym of Counterfeit

Yesterday would have been Joe Maneri's birthday. The first one since his passing last August.

I wanted to write about him yesterday, but I couldn't bring myself to face the significance of the day. There was a memorial service for him in New York. I was here in Massachusetts. When he died, in Massachusetts, I was in Utah. I can't seem to be in the right state at the right time.

In my last telephone conversation with him, last summer, we talked about his birthday, for some reason. He told me something I never knew: he was proud of the fact that he was born on 2-9-27, whereas Charlie Parker was born on the 29th, and Lester Young was born on the 27th. Eerily, both Parker and Young were born in August, the month Joe would die. In fact, Joe died three days shy of what would have been Young's 100th birthday.

Over the years, Joe would say certain sentences that seemed to me so inspired that I would write them down. I wish I did this more often. I did write down a sentence about Lester Young: "Every note that Lester Young played said, 'I love you.'"

Joe was a chameleon in the best sense. Sometimes he was Italian; sometimes he was German; sometimes he was a classical musician; sometimes he was a jazz musician. But when he was a jazz musician, he was REALLY a jazz musician – not some sort of imitation, like when a concert pianist plays Gershwin, or when an English boy choir sings an African-American spiritual. Joe was bona fide at all times – the antonym of counterfeit.

As an example: this is a story told to me by his son Mat the afternoon of the funeral (one of many anecdotes floating around 7 Maple Lane that bittersweet afternoon). One evening, the Joe Maneri Quartet – consisting of Joe, Mat, Randy Peterson on drums, and I'm not sure who the bass player was at the time of the story – were giving a concert. After the concert, Mat and Randy stayed up quite late. The next morning, Mat and Randy groggily descended to the breakfast table. There was Joe, eating breakfast. Now, before I go any further: I had many breakfasts with the Maneris and can attest, firsthand, that fresh garlic was not an unusual ingredient on the breakfast table. It wasn't every morning. But it was not at all unusual to have what Joe would call "Sicilian French Toast": bread dipped in egg and fried, in the regular way, but instead of butter and maple syrup, the condiments were olive oil, grated pecorino romano, salt, pepper, and fresh chopped garlic. Another permutation might be bread or toast dipped in olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and lemon juice. In any case, Mat and Randy sleepily arrived at the breakfast table, to see Joe with, in Mat's words, "a jelly donut in one hand and a clove of garlic in the other." Joe's response to their facial grimaces: "Man, you cats don't know what it's about."

Indeed, it was as a "cat" that the Joe Maneri of later years was most widely appreciated. And yet it was as the great classical composer that I always saw him. Joe had one of the rarest musical gifts I ever encountered. He could hear any piece of music – and I mean any piece – and he had the uncanny ability to know what the composer was doing. Maybe some rare musicians can do this with Palestrina, or with Mozart, or with Elliott Carter, or with Milton Babbitt, or with Pietro Mascagni. I personally witnessed Joe do it with all of them. Even my own music! I'll never forget the time we sat and listened to a CD of my "Suite Siciliana" for chamber orchestra. Mind you, he'd never heard the piece before. Well, every nuance in the music, even the most subtle one, could be seen in this reactions on his face. For a moment I wondered if he had actually composed the piece, not me.

The last piece of music he and I ever listened to was Al Jolson singing, "You Made Me Love You." Though Joe played this sort of music in his youth in Brooklyn, I doubt seriously that he listened to, or even thought about, this sort of genre for many years. And yet I will never, so long as I live, forget the radiance on his face. He bobbed his head at every musical nuance, as if he knew what was coming next, as if he himself had did the orchestration and was himself singing. His smile lit up not only that room, but my whole life. Because if music is to be felt any less strongly than this, what is the point?

Musical Excellence

The following was a piece I wrote for The Reporter, the monthly newsletter of Christ Lutheran Church in Natick, Massachusetts, where I am Director of Music.

MUSICAL EXCELLENCE

Since age seven, music has been the raison d'être of my life. There was not a single, solitary instance that my parents had to ask me to practice. There were times when they hoped I would stop.

This is not to say that music has always made me happy. It's just that not doing music made me unhappy, so I really had no choice. I didn't choose music; it chose me.

The times I was unhappiest were the times that music felt like entertainment. When music is entertainment, practicing suddenly becomes a striving for the things that don't matter. No harm is intended when a concertgoer watches a young pianist and says, "Wow, look how fast his fingers are going." But how does that make the young pianist feel? For me, it felt like being a circus attraction. "Wow, look how tall that woman is. Look how fat that man is." It's the fixation with some unusual physical attribute, not an interest in the person. It made me want to practice less, because if practicing made me more "unusual," I didn't want to do it. I wanted to be normal.

Perhaps the most harmful aspect of the musical world is the competition. A musical competition is no different from a figure skating tournament in the Olympics. You go on the ice. As soon as you slip, the judges put a checkmark on their sheet. You just went from 10 to 9.75. Slip again -- another checkmark. Now you're at 9.5. And so forth. It's not that the best skater wins; the skater who did least badly wins. The winner isn't chosen; everyone else is eliminated. If the point of my practicing is to prevent the judges' checkmarks, it's very hard to motivate myself to practice.

The times I was happiest were the times that music felt not like entertainment but like healing. When I play a religious service or a concert, the best I can hope for is for someone to say to me afterward, "Thanks, I needed that. I was having a terrible day, and I almost didn't come. But I'm so glad I did, because your music soothed me. I'm feeling so much better than I did before." A doctor may prescribe a pill; the pill might make you feel better, or it might make you sicker. But if I can make people feel better with my music, that is no small feat.

When the goal is healing, then I have a reason to practice. Because now I'm not serving the competition adjudicator, or the circus spectator. Now I'm serving a person on a human level. I'm trying to prepare that piece of music so that its expressive qualities -- indeed, its healing qualities -- can best emerge.

One of the most miraculous things that has occurred to me in a long time occurred right here at CLC. I was in the car with my wife, heading for Natick for that first interview. I fretted the whole way -- to the great annoyance of my wife Jeanette, who wondered why she was wasting the time and fuel to take someone somewhere that he didn't seem to want to go!

We pulled into the parking lot. I walked in the door. I looked up on the wall. And there was Moses.

I was floored, because I instantly knew who the artist was. The reason I instantly knew is because I first met Joe & Sonja Maneri when I was about eight years old. They were like my other parents, the parents that I would have chosen if one could choose one's parents. Joe passed away last August. There is no way to convey my grief at the loss of one of the greatest musicians, and human beings, that I have ever known.

It was Joe Maneri who taught me that music could heal -- and must heal. There is an amazing story, an absolutely true one, which I do not believe was unique in Joe's life. Many years ago his daughter Nina was sick in the hospital. And yet he had this powerful urge inside him to attend a party. He was at war within himself. "My daughter is here sick in the hospital, but why do I want to leave and go to this stupid party? What's wrong with me?" To make a long story short, he quietly left the hospital, went to the party, and there was a young woman, crippled from birth with cerebral palsy, sitting in a wheelchair. Her grandmother sat next to her. Joe took out his clarinet and started to play, "Hava Nagilah," which in Hebrew means, "Let us rejoice." Sonja accompanied on the piano. The girl stood up from her wheelchair and started moving her hips. She was dancing! The girl's grandmother was floored. She said, "I don't know who this Jesus of yours is, but he must be pretty wonderful." Joe returned to the hospital, and his daughter recovered just fine.

I don't know how to heal someone like that. But I should would like to find out! May I always strive for the highest musical excellence. But may it never be for entertainment.

The "Hava Nagilah" story was even wilder than what I wrote in the church article. One day Joe had been wearing a pair of shoes that had seen better days. A woman said, "Joe, if those shoes last another year, I'm going to throw a birthday party for them." A year passed; Joe was still wearing the shoes; and so the party in question was -- get this -- a birthday party for his shoes! Imagine Joe's dilemma: stay with daughter in hospital or go to birthday party for shoes! Just goes to show: sometimes what the Lord asks us to do is more unusual than, "Put $100 in the collection plate," or, "Recite the 'Our Father.'"

The Funerals of Maneri & Kennedy

Organists and Catholic clergy have a stereotype of each other. Priests feel that organists are "in it just for the organ," and organists feel that priests are "enemies of good music." The stereotype is much more often true for clergy than for organists; I can't think of one organist colleague of mine that does not have a great liturgical sensitivity and knowledge, while a large majority of the priests I have known seem to be allergic to the arts.

However, as I read a popular organist Listserv, I see comments of such a fanatical nature that I begin to understand that, in many cases, priests' complaints about organists are entirely justified. One Lister wrote:

> I was shocked at the lack of organ used during [Sen. Kennedy's] funeral broadcast live

That is precisely the trait that priests complain about -- and they're RIGHT. What kind of fanatic listens to those eulogies by EMK Jr. and President Obama and laments the lack of organ music? Should they have eliminated one of those two speeches and replaced it with the Muffat Passacaglia?

Another Lister observed:

> It seems clear to me that all the competing priests from various
> institutions overwhelmed any proper liturgical preparation, resulting
> in bizarre absence of basic liturgical music,

As for "liturgical preparation," I'm guessing there was none whatsoever. To wit: I'm guessing there were Washingtonians organizing the thing, and the clergy simply took it upon themselves to say, "Let us pray" and "Amen" at the proper times.

As for the "bizarre absence of basic liturgical music:" Yes, it would have been nice to hear Jack Nicholson singing "Holy, Holy." But should the Mass have lasted three hours? What are these organists advocating, fewer eulogies and more Haugen?

The organists of the List missed a very crucial point. Had the Mass been more "normal" musico-liturgically, there would have been even MORE of an outcry that Sen. Kennedy didn't deserve such. (Murder is generally frowned upon in the Catholic Church. Unless you're talking about the Crusades, but "that was different.")

Though I agree that the Mass could have been trimmed down -- Domingo subtracted more than he added, and maybe we didn't need a whole cadre of eulogists -- I suggest that, overall all, it was "the way it should have been."

An interesting contrast was the funeral for Joe Maneri. It occurred last Friday at a Nazarene Church in Framingham. Sonja wanted a church service that was just that: a church service. Not a concert, not a musical marathon, just a church service. And it was, with simple hymns, a wonderful sermon, and an unforgettable eulogy (only one). The only "luxury" was to have Joe's piano fugues played for the prelude and postlude. (I'm not saying my playing of them was "luxurious" -- I simply did my best under the circumstances. They are great music).

The interesting thing about this "church service that really was a church service" is that, with Joe's hundreds of colleagues, former students, etc. that would have been happy to lend their talents at a moment's notice, it could have turned into a circus very easily.

My point is: I agree that a church service should never be made a mockery of. And there were, indeed, aspects of Sen. Kennedy's funeral that were "not like a regular Funeral Mass." But I thank God that this complicated Catholic did not receive a regular one, because that would have been a much graver mockery.

Maneri in the Blogosphere

It has been a pleasure to see obits for Joe Maneri pop up on so many different blogs from around the world.

A few writers really "got it," capturing the Joe that I loved.

"It would be hard to overstate how beloved Joe was by the students who took his microtonal improv class at NEC. It seemed he lit a fire in everyone who'd enrolled, through the sheer force of his outsized personality. ... [He was] an inspirational -- practically evangelical -- educator."
Darcy James Argue

"I have fond memories of the half dozen times I was fortunate to catch him in performance. The best was the first at the Chicago Cultural Center and a post-show hang at a downtown hotel with Bhob Rainey as our impromptu sponsor. In the bar, over a bowl of peanuts, Joe regaled us with tales of his past, present and future for hours, finally taking down my address and promising to write when it came time to count sheep. A month went by, two, and I forgot all about the pledge. Then, out of the blue, I found an envelope in my mailbox festooned with glitter and gold star stickers & post-marked from Massachusetts. Inside was a hand-written letter from Joe with an apology for his delay in reply and an effusive, stream-of-consciousness reflection on that magical Chicago night. I still have the letter and treasure it."
"Derek"

"[F]or all the saxists whose sounds have been compared to crying, Maneri was the one who sounded most like he was sobbing when he played. His lines were like hoarse, slow-motion laments. It was a devastating soundworld that his band created[.]"
Hank Shteamer

"Utter greatness. Pretty rare in these modern times for a guy to have a completely (and I mean completely as in NOBODY) unique sound. I've heard his sound on the saxophone compared to a cry but to me it always sounded like some strange language that only he knew how to speak but was easy to understand emotionally."
"me wag"


"I heard yesterday of the passing of my teacher Joe Maneri.
He was by far the most influential teacher I’ve ever had. ... [T]he most profound impact on me was his spirit. Joe so lived music it was part of everything he did, the way he talked, the way he walked, the way he drove a car, everything. And he wanted to share it with you because he dug it so, so much. I’ve never seen a teacher give so much of himself to a student, ever. [...]
He was a father figure for me and many other students. He gave us all permission to find our own music, and I will forever be profoundly grateful to him."
Greg Sinibaldi

Joe Maneri

I am still feeling too devastated to write at length about Joe Maneri. It would be difficult to exaggerate how much his death has impoverished our world. He was the greatest musician I ever knew, and he was the most loving man I ever knew -- and maybe that is no coincidence.

More later.

Exactly five years and two days before Joe's death,
this photo was taken at my older son's Christening
Brookline, MA, 22 August 2004
(Photo: Paul Raila)

RIP Joe Maneri (1927-2009)

Yesterday at 4:40 p.m., Utah time, I received the devastating phone call that I was dreading. About 40 minutes prior (6 p.m., Boston time), Joe Maneri passed away.

I feel no fear of contradiction when I say that he was one of the great musicians of the world. He was more than one of the leading microtonal composers and theorists. He was more than one of the most celebrated jazz improvisers (more famous in Europe than America, ironically). He was someone with the truest understanding of and sensitivity towards music of all periods, be it Palestrina or Elliott Carter. He may very well have been one of the most underappreciated classical musicians of his time.

He and his wife, the outstanding artist Sonja Holzwarth Maneri (who did the painting pictured here), were like parents to me. And so I am too speechless to write anymore at this time.

Portrait by Sonja Holzwarth Maneri (image from JoeManeri.com)