About the Composer

I’m thrilled to have just stumbled across this picture montage and interview excerpt of my former S.F. Conservatory composition teacher Conrad Susa discussing his beautiful orchestral work The Blue Hour. It was prepared by music journalist and long-time Conservatory faculty member Scott Foglesong for this article about a concert of music by Conrad and another beloved former teacher Elinor Armer that took place last year.

I’m particulary fond of this passage in Scott’s article:

Conrad Susa’s music is of a fashion some writers may call accessible, a reprehensible term deserving a lifetime Sour Grapes Award on behalf of twitchy academic composers everywhere. Forget the term, and forget everything some well-intentioned sap has told you about contemporary music.

One is not required to understand the music, or appreciate it. It’s perfectly OK simply to enjoy it, let it be what it is and refrain from labels, -isms, -ibles, cubbyholes and pigeonholes. Susa offers the notion of “a transfiguration of an ordinary moment. And it puts a halo around a time of day and makes it blessed, something is conferred on it, or it confers something.”

Among several CDs I picked up on a recent Amoeba Records binge, I think I’ve stumbled across a musical ancestor. This 1989 Seattle Symphony recording of Howard Hanson’s Symphonies 1 and 2 was sitting there staring at me from the clearance bin, so I idlely grabbed it, thinking ‘what the heck’.

Having never paid any attention to Hanson before, I listened to it for the first time with great interest. About two thirds of the way through the final movement of Symphony No. 1, I heard something that made me stop and rewind.

Keep in mind that I’ve never heard this Hanson symphony before in my life, and check this out. It’s an excerpt from my 2000 orchestra piece Misterium Tremendum.

It’s funny to me, because a review of a 2003 performance of Misterium picked on it for ripping off Sibelius, and I actually wasn’t familiar with Sibelius when I wrote the piece. I eventually got to know and love Sibelius, partly thanks to that review (which was actually quite fair and astute).

Turns out I was ripping off Hanson without realizing it. Hanson, I found out from the liner notes, was a Sibelius fan himself. What’s particularly interesting is the news that one of Hanson’s students was William Bergsma who taught my last teacher, Conrad Susa. I suppose that makes him a musical great-grandfather of sorts.