Arthur Berger, a composer, critic and teacher considered one of American music's elder statesmen, died yesterday at age 91, The Boston Globe reports.
Berger was known as a staunchly individual composer and skilled prose writer whose work appealed to musicians for several generations. He published a collection of his essays, Reflections of an American Composer, last year to mark his 90th birthday and the Globe says he was active in Boston-area concert life until he broke a hip last spring.
Geoffrey Burleson recently recorded Berger's complete piano music, and the first CDs in a new edition of his complete orchestral works, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose, are due out this week, the Globe reports.
Born in New York, Berger studied at New York University, at Harvard with Walter Piston and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. After returning to the United States, he was involved in the Young Composers Group led by Aaron Copland. Berger published a book about Copland's music in 1953.
Beginning in 1943, Berger worked for a decade as a music writer at The New York Herald Tribune after Virgil Thomson, the paper's chief critic, recruited him.
Berger first achieved recognition with neo-classical compositions in the 1940s but over time his harmonies grew more adventurous. Milton Babbitt once referred to him as a "diatonic Webern," according to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. After 1957, Berger began using serial methods, although he later developed his own compositional processes.
Berger's output was small and consisted mostly of pieces for piano and chamber ensembles. One of his few orchestral works, Ideas of Order, was premiered by the New York Philharmonic under Dmitri Mitropoulos in 1952.
"Arthur never yielded his musical integrity in any way," Rose told the Globe. "One of the reasons he wrote so few pieces was that his only aim was to make each one as perfect, as pristine, as structurally sound as he could. He never compromised."
Berger moved to the Boston area to teach at Brandeis University in 1953. After leaving Brandeis in 1980, he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he remained until 1999.
— Michael Markowitz
"Arthur Berger, meticulous
composer, lively critic"
Richard Dyer - The Boston
Globe - 8 October 2003
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