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We are all in such a state of shock over
Jonathan's sudden death that I would like to step away from
the present and begin with recollections of earlier days. Jonathan
and I met almost 35 years ago, in the Fall of 1969, when I began
my first teaching job at the University of California at Berkeley.
He had recently completed his doctorate in composition at Berkeley
under the guidance of Andrew Imbrie and Joseph Kerman, and he
held a lectureship there for a year before moving to his first
full academic appointment at Oberlin. Jonathan and I were the
two youngsters on the Berkeley composition faculty. We shared
interests not only in composition but also in issues of musical
structure and aesthetics. So naturally we hit it off, and thus
began a life-long friendship.
Jonathan had studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen at UC/Davis
a year or so before. This was a seminal experience for him.
Stockhausen was a welcome antidote, in those rebellious times,
to the mainstream tradition established by Roger Sessions at
Berkeley. This episode encouraged Jonathan's experimental side
and gave him a cosmopolitan outlook that he never abandoned.
At the same time, he started to question musical trends, thinking
about them from many points of view; he became, in a word, a
critic as well as a creator. Perhaps some of this attitude came
from having studied with Kerman, but I think it mostly originated
in Jonathan's own nature.
After the shared year at Berkeley, our paths continued to cross
intermittently. In the 1970s we both held revolving-door junior
professorships in the East, he at Yale and I at Harvard. When
he came to Cambridge to visit his old music tutor at Dunster
House, where he had lived while a Harvard undergraduate, we
would get together and talk musical shop. Independently and
simultaneously, we were both becoming actively involved with
music theory, especially with how theory might develop so as
to be perceptually relevant to composition.
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