In Memoriam

RICHARD TEITELBAUM (1939–2020)

Pioneering electronic artist, keyboardist and composer Richard Teitelbaum passed away on April 9, 2020 due to a stroke.  Teitelbaum taught electronic and experimental music as a Professor of Music at Bard for over 30 years, and co-chaired the music department of the Master of Fine Arts program. He is survived by his wife, classical pianist Hiroko Sakurazawa.  Teitelbaum was well known for his pioneering work in live electronic music, and his early explorations of intercultural improvisation and composition. He graduated from Haverford College in 1960, and received a masters degree in theory and composition from Yale in 1964.  He won a Fulbright to study in Italy in 1964 with Goffredo Petrassi, then in 1965 with Luigi Nono.

In 1966 he co-founded the trailblazing live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) in Rome with Frederic Rzewski and Alvin Curran, and brought the first Moog synthesizer to Europe the following year. In the mid-1960s, he created what became known as "brainwave music," after pressing inventor Robert Moog to adapt his company's modular synthesizer to use neural oscillations as control voltages.  He returned to the United States in 1970 to create the World Band, one of the first intercultural improvisation groups, which was made up of master musicians from India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East and North America. His works since then frequently combined live electronics with the music of other cultures. In 1977 he spent a year in Tokyo, studying shakuhachi (bamboo flute) with the great master Katsuya Yokoyama.  He performed his works at Berlin's Philharmonic Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Almeida Theater and South Bank in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and in concerts and festivals throughout Europe, North America, East Asia and Latin America. He was commissioned by leading performers, including pianists Aki Takahashi and Ursula Oppens. In 2002 he received a Guggenheim fellowship to create “Z'vi,” the second opera in a projected trilogy dealing with Jewish mystical expressions of redemptive hopes. Extended sections of “Z'vi” were premiered at the opening of the Frank Gehry designed Performing Arts Center at Bard College and at the 2003 Venice Biennale. It will be presented again at the Center for Jewish History in New York in April 2005. The first opera of this series, Golem: An Interactive Opera, was premiered at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1989, and subsequently performed in Amsterdam, Berlin, Linz, Victoriaville, Quebec and Seoul, South Korea.

Teitelbaum received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim in 2002 to create his opera “Z'vi,” as well as two Fulbrights, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and commissions from several German radio stations, the Venice Biennale, Meet the Composer/Readers Digest, and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust. In 2004 he received a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation to compose an interactive instrumental and computer work for the Da Capo Chamber Players, which premiered in 2005.

His many recordings include: “Blends” (New Albion); “Golem: an Interactive Opera” (Tzadik); “The Sea Between” with Carlos Zingaro (Victo); “Live at Merkin Hall” with Anthony Braxton (Music and Arts); “Concerto Grosso” for Human Concertino and Robotic Ripieno (Hat Art); and “Spacecraft” with Musica Elettronica Viva (Alga Marghen).

The Richard Teitelbaum Award for composers concentrating in electronic music was established in his honor by New Albion Records.

LUIS GARCIA–RENART (1936-2020)

"It is with deep sadness and regret that I announce to the Bard community the death, this morning, of my close friend and esteemed colleague, Luis Garcia-Renart. Luis turned 84 this past June, a month ago. He taught at Bard continuously since 1962. Last year was his 58th year of uninterrupted service as a teacher.
 
Luis was a true natural in all things musical. He was possessed of a fabulous ear. He communicated in his playing, conducting, and teaching the full measure of music’s power. He had an infectious belief in the power of music, in all its forms, and music’s capacity to communicate. His command of music was consummate.
 
Luis began his career as a brilliant, prize-winning virtuoso ʼcellist. Although acclaimed around the world and honored with many prizes and medals, Luis chose the vocation of teaching. He succeeded Emil Hauser, the venerable founder of the Budapest String Quartet, at Bard in 1962. He, like Hauser before him, became the primary teacher of instrumental music at the college. Hauser had been a colleague of Pablo Casals, the great Catalan cellist and humanist. Luis was a beloved protégé of Casals, arguably the greatest cellist in modern history, and the foremost exponent of Casals’ approach to music making.
 
Luis was born to a proud Catalan and Spanish family that was fiercely loyal to the Republic of Spain. With the fall of the Republic, Luis’s family took refuge in Mexico, the nation that uniquely opened its doors to refugees from the Republic of Spain in the 1930s. He was brought up in Mexico and remained for his entire life a staunch Mexican patriot. He was also a fierce advocate of the Catalan language. Like his sister Marta, a distinguished pianist who survives him, Luis showed extraordinary aptitude as a child. Luis’s father sent him, as a boy, to Pablo Casals, who supervised his training as a musician. After years of studying with Casals, Luis went to Soviet Russia to study with Mstislav Rostropovich, who remembered him—the “Spanish one”—with admiration and affection. Along the way Luis also became a fantastic guitarist. And he was a fabulous linguist and avid stamp collector.
 
Despite his talent and accomplishments as an instrumentalist, Luis was never comfortable with the values and demands of an international concert career. As he and his students discovered, Luis was born to teach. He loved teaching. At Bard, he was as generous with a beginner as he was with an advanced student. He turned no one away and believed in the potential of every student. He was the finest chamber music coach I have ever observed and the most gifted counselor on the complex subject of string playing. Luis taught everything in Bard’s music curriculum. In every lesson and in every class the intensity of emotion and beauty of form in all manner of musics were never absent.
 
During his many years in the Hudson Valley, Luis served as principal ʼcellist in the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, and played countless concerts as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. He also taught for many years at Vassar College, alongside his Bard appointment. Luis turned to conducting in the 1970s and was acting music director of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, conductor of the Cappella Festiva, the first Bard Community Chorus, the Bard College Orchestra, and the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra. Among the most memorable of his concerts was an unannounced midnight performance of Mexican songs, here at Bard, with Luis playing the guitar and singing.
 
In his last decade and a half Luis became an essential part of the founding faculty of Bard’s Conservatory of Music, primarily as a coach. Musicians, not only string players, but instrumentalists of all types and singers went to perform for him, seeking his advice and counsel. The conservatory students experienced in Luis’s final years as a teacher not only his love of music, but his striving for expressive commitment and perfection so that no note and musical phrase fails to reach the heart and soul of the listener. Countless musicians, many of great distinction, owe a deep debt to Luis’s instruction. The list of professionals whom he influenced is astonishing. To that list we must add generations of Bard students, musicians and non-musicians alike. Luis instilled the love of music as an essential form of life. An extraordinary belief in music and a unique link to the great 20th-century traditions of performance were sparked and sustained by Luis’s teaching. And he loved Bard and was grateful to it.
 
Luis Garcia-Renart is survived by his sister and his children—Marcel, Isel, Evan, Julian, and AnaIsabel. His daughter, Kati Garcia-Renart ’89, who teaches dance at Simon’s Rock, and his former wife, Prudence Garcia-Renart ’65, lovingly cared for Luis during his final illness these past months.
 
I speak for the entire Bard community, including many generations of colleagues and alumni/ae, when I extend to his family our heartfelt condolences. The funeral and interment will be private. Luis’s ashes will be buried in the Bard College Cemetery. A memorial will take place at a date in the future when the making of music in real time and real space, unimpeded by fear or danger—the experience to which Luis Garcia-Renart’s life was devoted—can be resumed."
 
Leon Botstein
President, Bard College

FREDERICK HAMMOND (1937–2023)

"It is with sadness that I inform the Bard community of the death of our colleague, Frederick Hammond, just a few days ago. He served as Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Culture and Music History at Bard between 1989 and 2013, when he retired. Fred suffered from progressive heart disease; he was quite ill during these past months. But his mind and spirit did not weaken. Last August he celebrated his 85th birthday. A memorial service is being planned according to his wishes, and he will be interred in the Bard College cemetery.
 
Fred was an exceptional scholar and performer. He was a member of a pioneering post World War II generation of American music historians, many of whom, like Fred, were not only scholars, but performers. He was an undergraduate at Yale University, where he also completed his PhD. He taught first at the University of Chicago, then at Queens College of the City University of New York, and subsequently, for almost a quarter century, at the University of California, Los Angeles, before coming to Bard. He was the first full-time music historian in Bard’s history.
 
Fred was a distinguished scholar of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music. He is best known for his definitive biography and study of the works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. His other major contributions to scholarship concern patronage and culture during the Baroque era in Rome, primarily the contributions of the Barberini family. His scholarly interests made Fred Hammond an expert and connoisseur of all things Italian, including its ancient and modern history, its literature, and above all, its language.
 
This summary does not do justice to the exceptional depth, mastery of detail, and subtlety of Fred Hammond’s learning. He was a true scholar who loved archives, manuscripts, and the joy of searching for clues and evidence to solve historical riddles and paradoxes, small and large. He inspired and trained many younger scholars, including the late James Harold Moore, a protégé from Fred’s years at UCLA who discovered major works of the Baroque long thought forgotten and who solved the mystery of performance practices inside the church of San Marco in Venice, the subject of one of Fred’s last publications.
 
Fred Hammond was a distinguished keyboard player. He was a student and protégé of Ralph Kirkpatrick, the eminent harpsichordist and expert on Scarlatti. Fred studied with Kirkpatrick at Yale. Fred’s primary instruments were the harpsichord, clavichord, and the organ; his knowledge of the history of these instruments was astonishing. He played continuo in professional performances for most of his life. In the 1980s he was the continuo player for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Fred directed the E. Nakamichi Festival of Baroque Music in Los Angeles, and the Clarion Music Society in New York. At Bard, he played in many a Bard Music Festival, including a delightful performance of an opera by Franz Joseph Haydn.
 
Fred was charming, wonderfully articulate, and generous to others. His command of English, in writing and speech, was elegant and exemplary. His writings mirrored an ideal of clarity and refinement. His concern for the beauty of language betrayed a lifelong love, not only of the intersection of words and music found in sacred music, opera and song, but also of poetry, particularly the work of W. H. Auden.
 
As a performer and scholar, Fred’s range was astonishing. He was as well versed in the music of the 19th and 20th century as he was in the music of the 18th, 17th, and 16th centuries. The exceptional range of his expertise was available to Bard undergraduates, not only in Annandale but in the Bard Prison Initiative. Fred was the first to teach music history in BPI. He did so with great imagination and style; he considered teaching in BPI a high point in his career as a teacher.
 
Fred had a special gift for friendship. He maintained friendships all over the world. Our neighbor, James B. Ottaway, a life trustee, was a friend from their years together at Yale. Fred’s circle at Bard included the late Irma Brandeis, the late William Weaver, and our colleagues James Bagwell and Karen Sullivan. In the over 30 years Fred was a member of the Bard community, he never failed to volunteer his services, whether at Commencement (playing for the memorial service as organist) or student concerts. Fred possessed a deep love of this college.
 
On a personal note, I first met Fred Hammond as a first-year student in college, when I played in a performance under his direction of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Many years later, through Jim Ottaway, we became reacquainted. Bard was able to realize Fred’s dream, to return to the east coast as a teacher, scholar, and performer. Reading Fred Hammond’s work, and remembering many performances with him, the refinement and beauty of his understanding of music, art, architecture, and literature stand out. If Fred Hammond had chosen not to become a musician, he might have been a poet of great distinction, not unlike his dear friend, the late James Merrill. 
 
Bard will miss Fred, as will musicians, scholars, and friends, here in the Hudson Valley, on the east coast, and others in Europe. His life and work will be remembered, as will his devotion to the towering achievements of the human imagination."

Leon Botstein
President, Bard College