Spotlight on Composer Paul Alan Levi

by ALEX WEISER

Paul Alan Levi is a Jewish American composer (b. 1941) who grew up in Inwood, New York City, which at the time was largely comprised of German Jews and Irish Catholics. His parents were both German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1920s.

Levi’s father was from Mayen, Germany where his father was “everything but the Rabbi,” leading all of the weddings and life cycle events in the town. His father felt he had attended  “enough rituals for a lifetime,” and as an adult wanted to turn away from them, and so, as a result, religion didn’t play a large role in their family life. Nevertheless, Levi insisted on having a Bar Mitzvah. He recalls, “I wasn’t going to pass up any ceremony that would make me a man.” To prepare for this he attended Sunday school. Despite his father’s attitude towards religion, Levi recalls that his family held fairly formal Passover seders each year, run by his grandfather.

Levi’s father worked as a bookkeeper at a stock brokerage house for his entire working life, and spent the majority of his free time and money during the 1930s helping family members emigrate from Germany. He was also an amateur pianist who enjoyed playing Brahms and Beethoven. Levi followed suit, studying piano as a child, and when he was a young man he played four-hand music together with his father – particularly, Mozart, Schubert, and arrangements of Mozart and Haydn symphonies.

Levi’s mother was from Frankfurt. She worked as a social worker and was involved in the woman’s labor movement. When Levi was a child she sang labor and lefty folk songs to him such as Ain’t got a barrel of money. She died of pancreatic cancer when Levi was 11.

In addition to piano and folk songs, a great early influence for Levi was musicals. Levi recalled a high school production of Finian’s Rainbow when he was 13 – at the romantic climax of the play,Woody kisses Sharon on the forehead and Levi thought, “Wow, this is for me.” He wanted to compose and conduct musicals.

Levi studied music composition at Oberlin Conservatory (1959-1963). At that time the composition faculty were focused on dodecaphonic music and didn’t take musicals seriously. Though he was engaged in listening and analysis of ‘serious’ classical music such as Bartók and Schoenberg, the music he wrote at this time consisted of a Winnie the Pooh musical and two musical revues.

Levi recalls that after leaving Oberlin he had the desire to write more complex music, but didn’t know how to approach the stylistic idiom of contemporary classical music at the time. He explains, “although I hadn’t written ‘classical’ music, I had a lot of chops. I could write really good counterpoint, I had written tunes, I had ‘moved the pencil’ a lot, I knew about instrumentation --I just couldn’t get the idiom.”

At the age of twenty-five Levi studied with Hall Overton, a jazz pianist and a classical composer, a very open and eclectic person, who become Levi’s formative teacher. One of the formative texts for Levi at this time was Twentieth Century Harmony by Vincent Persichetti (who had been Hall Overton’s teacher). Levi explains that this book helped him think about harmony in a fresh way:“Instead of chords always having roots or built on triads, they were based on intervals and you could have any intervals, and they all created different kinds of effects or emotions – it’s a great book.”

At the age of 30, the same year his first child was born, Overton convinced Levi to go to Juilliard for a Masters and then a Doctoral degree. Eventually Overton passed Levi on to study with Vincent Persichetti, since he wanted Levi to study with someone with a different approach.

As a composer, Levi became particularly known for his major choral works. Recalling the experience of looking for a text for an early major commission Levi muses that despite the temptation to write a mass setting (because of the great canonical texts and traditions of settings of them), he couldn’t do it. “I might not think of myself as Jewish composer, but I can’t write a mass.” Indeed, the work he would write for this occasion, his Mark Twain Suite (1983), was preceded and followed by masses by Haydn and Janček at its Carnegie Hall premiere.

Another major choral/orchestral commission was for a Passover oratorio, Dayenu: a fifty-minute oratorio in two sections,one covering the escape from Egypt as it is told in Exodus in the Torah (in English translation), and one describing an escape from a concentration camp. Dayenu was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1996.

In the realm of works with Jewish themes, Levi also wrote a Sabbath service in 1989, Songs for the Synagogue, and a cycle of Yiddish songs around 2000 at the request of an African American bass baritone, André Solomon Glover. Mr. Glover suffered from a stroke before the performance and ended up not able to perform them. These songs subsequently received their premiere at YIVO on December 2, 2014 by the Soprano Cantor Maria Dubinsky, with the composer at the piano.

Other major works include Transformations of the Heart (1987) an orchestral set of variations on a melody that had been thought to have been written by Orlande De Lassus, Holy Willie’s Prayer (1992) on texts by Robert Burns, Journey’s and Secrets(1994) and Acts of Love (2002) for choir and chamber orchestra, Venetian Mazes (2013)for solo piano, and Light at Play (2014) for orchestra.

Levi recalls the turning point in his life when he decided to focus on music in college and the response from his stepmother: “All you’re interested in his fun and fame.” Thinking back on the choices he has made in his life Levi reflects,“I may or may not be famous, but I am having fun with whatever I do.”

We will be featuring music by Paul Alan Levi at our upcoming concert with Yuval Waldman on Wednesday December 21st.

Alex Weiser is YIVO’s Programs Manager.

Based on an oral history interview with Paul Alan Levi conducted by Alex Weiser on December 2nd, 2016 in New York City. Quotes have been adapted from the conversation in consultation with Mr. Levi. The complete audio recording of the interview is now a part of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Sound Archive.

Alex Weiser is YIVO’s Director of Public Programs.