BD:    Does this interest in an older piece of your give you cause to re-evaluate your current opinions of some of your other early works?

HS:    It’s not so much as that.  What happened to me is a rather complex web of circumstances.  Even though I always thought it was accessible and a rather likeable piece for an audience, it doesn’t create fierce problems that Schoenberg or Ives did, and yet it was still totally un-played.  It was played and then dropped immediately.  It’s also quite a difficult piece, and it’s long.  So I thought if I’d been accessible and still can’t get it played, it’s a rather discouraging prospect.  The big mistake I made was trying to change things to make them a little simpler so the conductors and orchestras could play them more easily, because the main complaint was that my piece took too much rehearsal time.  That was a big mistake I never should have made.  A composer should stick to his guns and never yield to circumstance.  If you write difficult music, you just write difficult music, that’s all, and don’t try to make it simpler.

BD:    Then for whom do you write it?

HS:    You don’t write in a totally impractical dreamland, but if they’re not playing your music and you’re quite sure that it’s good, you should hang in there because history shows, in general, that if you have anything at all that’s worth doing, it’s going to come out.  That’s nice to say, but it can be very discouraging when it doesn’t.  In the world of painting, the famous case of modern times is Van Gogh, who never sold one painting in his lifetime.

BD:    Now they’re worth millions!

HS:    Every single one, and I don’t think it bothered him... Well, perhaps it did.  I’d forgotten his story, but in music it can happen.  But I find discouraging prospects of the future.  I’ve lost faith in written music because of that degree of neglect, because writing pieces that were expensive — in the sense of copying the parts and publication and all that — was a sort of useless problem, useless venture.  At least electronically, if you play with electronics, the synthesizers played back at you, which was rather pleasant.

BD:    Then everything is done once you’ve finished tinkering with the piece?

HS:    That kind of thing, yes.  It’s worth exploring, and we had some interesting ventures.  Some engineers and I were trying to create a synthesizer which played exactly like the instruments, as well as an instrument which did all the electronic sounds, too.  That’s not an easy job, electronically, to imitate the instruments in the orchestra exactly.  But it was a fascinating one.

BD:    Did you succeed?

HS:    We succeeded in large part, but not commercially.  The venture’s sort of scrapped at the moment, but it’s soon coming.  There is a modern instrument which is successful in approaching it from a different way, a different tack from the way we tried with the Kurzweil, which is currently in great vogue, and quite an instrument.

BD:    A lot of people have spoken highly of it.

HS:    Yes.  It’s a little different from what we were trying to do.  The Kurzweil tends to store instrumental sounds electronically, and then regurgitate them with a scanning kind of keyboard.  So you can go to the Boston Symphony or the Chicago Symphony and get the first trumpet or the first horn player to record his best notes, and then play them on a keyboard so that you sound like a first desk player.  There are difficulties there which are technical, but it’s difficult to change the attacks of those tones.

BD:    But suppose you were able to manufacture a machine that would do exactly what you’re saying perfectly.  Would that mean the death of live musicians?

HS:    It tends to not mean that.  It tends to change the way a lot of music is played already.  I don’t think people realize how much synthesized music they’re listening to.  Most commercial music is heavily synthesized.  It saves money, but it throws musicians out of work.  It’s going to change things.  The engineers I was working with had this curious dream

BD:    Are you pleased with the old recording of the Symphony for Classical Orchestra?

HS:    That one is on CRI, but the original is on a Columbia Record which is long out of print.  The CRI is a reconstituted stereo version of the early one.  That record came out in the very earliest days of high fidelity, 1951 or ’52, and considering it was the early days, the sound’s pretty good.  I hope the new one that’s going to come out is better; I’m not sure.  The orchestra is better, I’m sure.  That early recording was made by a pick-up group.  They were the best players in New York, but they still were thin on the strings because it was a recording.  They used six or eight first violins and that proportion in the string group.  It was rather mangy in the string group.  They tried to make up for it with miking techniques in those days, but it’s pretty good.  And of course, Lenny Bernstein is good.  The way that recording was made, it was all done in one day.  Lenny was knocking himself out and came down with a flu.  He went uptown to the doctor in the luncheon break, and was running a fever of 102, or something like that.  So he went and got shot full of penicillin, and came back like a hero and finished it all up.  I remember he thought the last movement was the hardest and needed the most energy, so we recorded that first and went progressively down to the first movement.  The first movement wasn’t so easy, though, so the first movement got the least recording time.  It sounds it, as I remember.  The new one that will come out as a compact disc on New World Records is with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, taken from a live performance.  That had plenty of rehearsal, and the orchestra is very good and gave it a bang-up performance.  Taking it from a live performance, you don’t have time to correct the balance and things that happen, but I recently listened to the tape and it’s very accurate.  There are not many mistakes in it, if any at all.

BD:    There’s enough fire in it?

HS:    Yes, I’d say so.  It has different qualities, but I hope it’s better all-around, otherwise people will say, “Oh, we liked the old one better.”  [Both laugh]

BD:    Are there any other recordings that I should know about?

HS:    Well, you found that Redwood one with the Trumpet Sonata.  I don’t know.  There may be some more.  [Laughs]

BD:    One of the articles I read mentions some recordings of piano music with you playing.

HS:    There’s an early recording that used to exist on Columbia.  [See photo of record jacket at right.]  I think it has been re-issued several times — I don’t know whether it’s current — of my old Four-Hand Sonata played by Leo Smit, my close friend, and myself.  That dates from way back.  He’s one of my oldest friends.  He’s a wonderful pianist and he’s also composing like crazy.

Harold Shapero, American Neo-Classical Composer, Dies at 93 By ANTHONY TOMMASINI Published: The New York Times, May 21, 2013 [Text only] Harold Shapero, a composer who was a central figure of American Neo-Classicism, a school of composition that thrived in the 1940s and ’50s, died on May 17 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 93. His death, at a nursing home, was announced by his family through a post on the Web site of Brandeis University, where Mr. Shapero, a professor emeritus, taught for 37 years. Born in Lynn, Mass., on April 29, 1920, Harold Samuel Shapero had a diverse musical youth. He became a skilled pianist, played jazz for fun and profit, and as a teenager studied composition with the Austrian-born composer Ernst Krenek, who tutored him in the 12-tone technique. But Mr. Shapero was drawn to Neo-Classical idioms, especially at Harvard, where he was a student of the American composer Walter Piston, and at the Berkshire Music Center in Lenox, Mass., where he worked with Paul Hindemith and became a close associate of Aaron Copland, who was 20 years older. The early 1940s was a period when many American composers were exploring complex methods and procedures, especially 12-tone technique. Neo-Classicists like Piston wrote works that essentially hewed to tonal harmony, put a premium on textural clarity and used traditional forms. Mr. Shapero, though, was particularly engaged by Stravinsky’s harmonically spikier and rhythmically vibrant Neo-Classical works. During the 1940s he wrote prolifically, including three witty and inventive piano sonatas, an exuberant Sonata for Violin and Piano, and diverse chamber works and songs. His major achievement during this period was his Symphony for Classical Orchestra, a 45-minute work in four movements, completed in 1947. When he began writing the symphony, Mr. Shapero thought he had undertaken a divertimento that would last at most 20 minutes, as he recalled in a 1999 interview with The New York Times. “But I had wildly miscalculated my materials,” he said. “When I measured out the slow movement, I was shocked. It was 15 minutes. I stopped working for a month. Then I tried to cut the thing. But it fought me and won. Slowly I became aware, with horror, of what I was writing: a long and difficult symphony. I thought I’d never get it performed.” But Leonard Bernstein, then 29, who had known Mr. Shapero at Harvard, found he had “fallen in love” with the piece, as Bernstein explained in a note to Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. [A portion of that note is reproduced below.]  Bernstein conducted the symphony’s premiere in a guest appearance with the Boston Symphony in January 1948. Two months later, Georg Szell performed it with the Cleveland Orchestra, though Szell had to be talked into doing so at a time when the orchestra was under pressure to play some American works. Szell had expressed doubts about the symphony during his first meeting with Mr. Shapero. “Szell was a fabulous musician who hated modern music,” Mr. Shapero recalled. “He summoned me, asked me to play the piece on the piano, then told me I didn’t know how to modulate and should study Richard Strauss.” The reviews were equivocal. The symphony, though long and difficult, is ingenious and engrossing. A shimmering opening Adagio segues into a bustling, contrapuntally complex Allegro, followed by a wistful Adagio, a misbehaving Scherzo and a hurtling, imposing finale. This audacious piece is like a brash, American contemporary counterpart to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. On a single hectic day in 1953, Bernstein, though suffering from a fever, recorded the Shapero symphony with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, a studio ensemble of top freelance New York musicians. But even that recording did not prevent the piece from slipping into oblivion, until 1986, when André Previn performed it, to acclaim, in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Martin Bernheimer, then a critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that “Shapero reveals himself here as a superb craftsman, an artist totally in control of the grandiose variables at hand.” The writing, he added, “is clever, subtle, elegant.” Ultimately, he wrote, the symphony “isn’t affecting in spite of the inherent anachronisms, but because of them.” Still, these Neo-Classical “anachronisms” found disfavor with the advocates of modernist techniques, who often held sway in the music departments of American universities. By the 1960s, stung by this criticism, Mr. Shapero wrote less and less. He explained his withdrawal to the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed in a 1986 interview. “Comfortable university life is a disaster, especially if you have a university that doesn’t pressure you to produce or perish,” he said. “And I had a young child. I like home handicrafts and hobbies. I like gardening. I like photography. So it was only too easy to put off some of those hard operations like writing music.” That child, Hannah Shapero, a commercial artist and electronic musician, survives him, along with his wife, Esther Geller, a visual artist. At Brandeis, Mr. Shapero mentored generations of composers and musicians and helped develop the university’s electronic music studio. After Mr. Previn introduced the Symphony for Classical Orchestra to the Los Angeles audience, he recorded it on the New World label and performed it during guest appearances with Mr. Shapero’s hometown Boston Symphony and other orchestras. This flurry of success motivated Mr. Shapero to compose again, including Three Hebrew Songs for Tenor, Piano and Strings Orchestra (1989) and, recently, 24 Bagatelles for Piano. Even at his nursing home, in his last months, Mr. Shapero requested and was brought manuscript paper. ----- This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 24, 2013 An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the orchestra that André Previn conducted in 1986, when it performed Mr. Shapero’s Symphony for Classical Orchestra. It was the the Los Angeles Philharmonic, not the Los Angeles Symphony.

© 1988 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded on the telephone on August 31, 1988.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1990, 1995 and 2000.  A copy of the unedited audio was given to the Oral History of American Music archive at Yale University.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2014.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.