faculty obituaries
“A Musical Lukas Foss Contrarian”
Lukas Foss, a CFA professor of music, challenged his students and his audience
By Natalie Jacobson McCracken
Lukas Foss, a retired College of Fine Arts professor of music and an acclaimed composer, conductor, and pianist, died on February 1. He was eighty-six. Foss began studying music at age seven in Germany and continued with prominent teachers after his family fled to Paris from Nazi Germany in 1932 and then moved to the United States. At fifteen, recommended by Gian Carlo Menotti, he entered the Curtis Institute of Music and his lifelong friendship with fellow student Leonard Bernstein began. Both went on to Tanglewood, where their faculty Fred Sway included Serge Koussevitzky (“Koussy was like my adopted father,” Foss said) “As a pianist he could define a new for players. “My work is written for and Paul Hindemith. piece, like Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety, people who can play,” he said. “They At twenty-two, Foss was the or show us a new side of an old Bach have to be damn good.” youngest composer to have a work concerto or a Mozart minuet. As a As a conductor — Foss led the premiered by the Boston Symphony composer he went everywhere, and Jerusalem Symphony, the Milwaukee Orchestra. He was the youngest to win his art is everything: serious and full Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, a Guggenheim Fellowship. At thirty- of humor, derivative and original, old and the Brooklyn Philharmonic — he one, he became a full professor at and new. What it is not is predictable, offered “provocatively innovative UCLA, succeeding Arnold Schoenberg. comfortable; he spoke as a musical programs,” Cornell says. “He chal- Foss (Hon.’03) was a determinedly contrarian.” lenged his students, and they loved him American composer — “more Catholic Foss’s signature compositions for it. All this was accomplished with a than the Pope,” he told Bostonia in include the orchestral works Piano wry spirit and a hint of mischief.” 1994. But when a critic like British Concerto No. 2 (1950), Baroque Foss joined the CFA faculty in 1991, musicologist Wilfred Mellers called Variations (1967), and Renaissance dividing his time between Boston and his work “a pocket history of American Concerto (1986), and the operas The New York. music during the twentieth century,” Jumping Frog of Calaveras County “Lukas Foss was a consummate it was not necessarily a compliment. (1950) and Griffelkin (1955). gentleman and a passionate teacher,” Foss was both extolled and reviled for His composition Symphonic recalls CFA Dean ad interim Walt his knowledgeable mixing of styles and Fantasy was commissioned by BU for Meissner (CFA’81). “His colleagues periods and for improvisations on the the occasion of his eightieth birthday and fellow artists will tell you about works of past masters that could seem and was premiered by the Boston his remarkable talent and legendary at once homage and deconstruction. University Symphony Orchestra in career, but I will remember Lukas most High-spirited ranging through the 2002 at Symphony Hall. Foss told fondly for his gentle nature and his literature and beyond characterized the B.U. Bridge, the University’s devotion to his students.” his music, says Richard Cornell, a CFA weekly newspaper, that the piece was “We are deeply privileged to have associate professor of composition. accessible for listeners, but challenging known him,” Cornell says.
68 BOSTONIA Spring 2009