Farewell to a Composer

Farewell to a Composer

Shepherd School to Pay Tribute to Retiring
Ellsworth Milburn With Concerts of His Music

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
December 2, 1999

Artists sometimes get pigeonholed. Ellsworth Milburn has not suffered such a fate.

Critics have described his music as craggy, colorful, romantic, aggressive, searing, sweetly poignant, overwhelming, thrilling, powerful, wickedly funny, eloquent, brilliant, raging and engaging.

Members of the Shepherd School community can summon equally strong words for a man they admire as an artist, teacher, colleague and friend.

Milburn, professor of composition and theory, will retire at the end of the fall semester after being a faculty member of the Shepherd School since it officially opened in 1975. He was chair of the department of composition and theory for more than half of his time at Rice.

The Shepherd School will pay tribute to Milburn at two upcoming events. On Dec. 4, the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra, with Larry Rachleff conducting, will perform Milburn’s “Chiaroscuro” along with works of other composers. The concert will be at 8 p.m. in Stude Concert Hall.

On Dec. 8, SYZYGY, the Shepherd School’s new-music series will celebrate his distinguished career with an evening of Milburn’s music. Included in the concert, performed by faculty and students, will be a preview of Milburn’s “String Quartet No. 3,” a work in progress, and a retrospective of his work that spans several decades: “Soli I” (1968); “Spiritus Mundi” (1974); “Character Pieces for Cello and Piano” (1980), with Norman Fischer, cello, and Jeanne Kierman, piano; and “Two Piano Pieces” (1989). The concert will be at 8 p.m. in Duncan Recital Hall.

Milburn says he is retiring to give himself more time for composing. It was not an easy decision, he says, because he’s loved teaching at the Shepherd School. He will live and work at his 13-acre country home in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Says Michael Hammond, dean of the Shepherd School, “Ellsworth Milburn has been with the Shepherd School almost from its beginning. He has made important contributions as a teacher, composer and as chairman of the composition department. We will all miss his steady hand.”

Art Gottschalk, associate professor and chair of composition and theory, describes Milburn as “undoubtedly one of the strongest and most versatilemusicians I have known. His string quartets are among the finest in contemporary literature.” Milburn’s approach to music, Gottschalk says, is “risky and yet always with good sense of proportion, perspective and humor.” And, says Gottschalk, “he is an inspiration to younger faculty who he has always supported and his students, who are numerous and successful.”

Says Richard Lavenda, associate professor of composition and theory: “It’s hard to imagine the Shepherd School without Ellsworth Milburn. It isn’t only that he’s been here since the school opened, but that he’s been such an important person in it. I consider him to be one of the finest composers in the country. He’s also a great teacher, a sensitive musician and a fair and generous person.”

Milburn began playing piano at age 7 and became interested in composing at age 12 or so when he was playing popular sheet music and realized that he could improvise an accompaniment that he believed to be better than what was printed on the sheet music. In high school he played in jazz groups and continued to do so as an undergraduate at UCLA.

In ’61, the renowned improvisational comedy group Second City came to Los Angeles to perform for three months, and Milburn was hired as their piano accompanist.

When the Second City company branched off to form a San Francisco-based improvisational troupe called the Committee, Milburn became one of its permanent members. He performed with the acclaimed comedy group from ’63 to ’68. Celebrities such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bill Cosby and Lenny Bruce would drop in to see the satirical show. In one skit, Milburn narrated and conducted a parody of a Leonard Bernstein children’s concert.

His stint with the Committee, Milburn says, was a wonderful experience that helped him significantly as a composer, because by working with an improvisational group he learned a great deal about timing and pacing.

When he came to Rice in ’75, he was following two of his University of Cincinnati faculty colleagues, the late Paul Cooper and Anne Schnoebelen, the Joseph and Ida Kirkland Mullen Professor of Music, who had both arrived in ’74 to help get the Shepherd School up and running.

As a composer, Milburn has received four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and commissions or performances from the Houston Symphony, the Concord and Lark string quartets and the Da Camera Society.

He says that composing is a combination of “a number of skills and techniques, along with spontaneity, deeply infused with history. At the same time, it should reach out to explore that which has not been done.”

Rachleff says that “Chiaroscuro,” the Milburn work he will conduct Dec. 4, is “very well-crafted, with wonderful orchestration and a strong dramatic intent. I’ve found that to be true of his music that I’ve conducted and music that I’ve heard. He’s certainly made a great commitment to the Shepherd School and his music deserves even greater attention than it has received. He’s truly one of America’s most gifted composers.”

Milburn says that he considers his 24 years at Rice to be “the real high point of my career. I wanted to help build a music school–start with a clean slate–and it has exceeded my expectations. I feel very proud of my contribution. The Shepherd School has achieved a level of excellence that I have not seen at any place I have studied or taught. Quite a bit of that is due to Michael Hammond’s vision and also due to the really superb colleagues I’ve had over the years.”