Steven Stucky, 66; professor and classical composer . WASHINGTON - "One
kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past," composer
Steven Stucky wrote, "to make the world anew in each new work, and so
to triumph over the dead weight of routine. I am the other kind . . .
who only sees his way forward by standing on the shoulders of those who
have already cleared the path ahead. Such was the case with his "Second
Concerto for Orchestra," the work that won him the 2005 Pulitzer Prize
in music. The composition was deeply informed by tradition - he called
it "an homage piece to the orchestra and to my heroes," Ravel,
Stravinsky, Sibelius, and Bartok. But it also was squarely in keeping
with his championing of contemporary classical music, neither parroting
nor repudiating some of the experimental musical motifs of his time.
Mr. Stucky, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, died Sunday at
his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 66. The cause was brain cancer, said
his wife, Kristen. In a career straddling academia and major concert
halls, Dr. Stucky spent 21 years affiliated with the Los Angeles
Philharmonic and also wrote for major orchestral ensembles in Chicago,
Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, and Philadelphia. This summer, Dr. Stucky
was scheduled to be the director of the Festival of Contemporary Music
at Tanglewood. The L.A. Philharmonic reigned large. His Pulitzer
Prize-winning concerto relied heavily on a complicated framework in
which letters of the alphabet were assigned to musical pitches. The
piece made playful references to friends and mentors associated with
the philharmonic, including architect Frank Gehry, who designed the
Walt Disney Concert Hall where the group performs, and former conductor
Esa-Pekka Salonen. Dr. Stucky focused on orchestral work and wrote only
one symphony, a short, four-part work that garnered praise at its debut
in 2012 for its accessibility and emotional power. Reviewing the work,
simply titled "Symphony," New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini
described Dr. Stucky's style as "intricate, pungent yet transparent
and, in the best sense, accessible. The composer drew heavily from the
classical canon in pieces such as "Funeral Music for Queen Mary," a
re-orchestration of three 17th-century works by the English composer
Henry Purcell, and the dreamy "Partita-Pastorale (After J.S. Bach). He
also did not hesitate to draw from more contemporary material. In 2014,
he adapted "The Classical Style," Charles Rosen's National Book
Award-winning analysis of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, into a comic
opera with the pianist Jeremy Denk. The work gently mocked the
earnestness with which classical music is sometimes analyzed as well as
the now-common refrain that classical music is dead. Steven Edward
Stucky was born in Hutchinson, Kan., on Nov. 7, 1949, and grew up in
Kansas and Texas. Neither of his parents was musical, but he learned
the viola at a young age and wrote a pair of symphonies. (Neither was
published.) He once told a radio interviewer in Eugene, Ore., that as a
youth he immersed himself in music, transforming him into an "orchestra
groupie" who "would rather be listening to an orchestra rehearsal -
more even than a concert - than to do anything else. In 1971, he
received a bachelor's degree in music from Baylor University. At
Cornell, he received a master's degree in 1973 and a doctorate in 1978,
both in music. In graduate school, he studied the work of Polish
composer Witold Lutoslawski, whom he later befriended. Lutoslawski's
music, he later said, had a "powerful combination of intellectual
integrity and beautiful sound so that when you heard it the last thing
you thought of was that sort of stereotypical, cerebral, modern
composer. His music is very direct, very emotional, very communicative.
He published a biography of the composer, "Lutoslawski and His Music"
(1981), to strong reviews. The book also won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor
prize. He later told the Los Angeles Times that the book "slowed my
development as a composer at a fairly crucial, tender age" but taught
him a good deal of "technical craftsmanship" from burrowing himself in
Lutoslawski's scores. Dr. Stucky joined the Cornell faculty in 1980,
becoming a professor and chair of the music department in the late
1990s. He was named professor emeritus in 2014, when he left Cornell to
join the composition faculty at the Juilliard School in New York City.
Because many of his works premiered in academic settings, Dr. Stucky
lacked prominence until relatively late in his career. His breakthrough
was a 1986 work called "Dreamwaltzes," a 15-minute conjuring of
Viennese waltzes that had been commissioned by the Minnesota
Orchestra's summer festival. It was a popular hit and brought him to
the attention of André Previn, who conducted it with the L.A.
Philharmonic. In one of the longest relationships between any American
orchestra and composer, Dr. Stucky was associated with the philharmonic
from 1988 to 2009, as composer-in-residence and then as new music
adviser. The orchestra commissioned his "Second Concerto for Orchestra.
His first marriage, to Melissa Whitehead, ended in divorce. In addition
to his wife, Dr. Stucky leaves two children from his first marriage.
Dr. Stucky's later works included "August 4, 1964" (2008), an oratorio
commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Stucky and the
librettist, Gene Scheer, examined a day in which the bodies of three
civil rights workers were discovered in Philadelphia, Miss., and
erroneous reports of an attack against a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin,
which led President Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War. The
piece was considered to be a criticism of the George W. Bush
administration and the ongoing war in Iraq, but Dr. Stucky said that
his aims for the oratorio, as for any of his works, were not strictly
political. "I think a great piece, whenever it was written, gets under
our skin, makes us feel something," he told the Aspen Times in 2013.
"That's what Beethoven was trying to do. I don't think music teaches
about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human
being. I'm trying to do the exact thing Verdi or Mendelssohn did: open
up that spiritual space where we can all be fully ourselves.
