Lukas Foss

German-born musician

• Born: August 15, 1922
• Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
• Died: February 1, 2009
• Place of death: New York, New York

A pianist, conductor, and composer, Foss promoted American and avant-garde musical works.

Early Life

Lukas Foss (LEW-kuhs fas) was born on August 15, 1922, in Berlin. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a painter. Foss was a natural and gifted musician. He studied piano from age seven to eleven with Julius Goldstein Herford. After hearing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (1786; The Marriage of Figaro) at age nine, he decided to make music his life.

To escape the Nazis, Foss’s family moved to Paris in 1933. Here Foss studied piano, composition, flute, and orchestration at the Paris Conservatoire. The family moved to New York in 1937, changing its name from Fuchs to Foss. In that year Foss successfully auditioned for Fritz Reiner for entrance to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Foss studied conducting with Reiner, as well as piano, composition, and orchestration, graduating with honors in 1940.

Foss was accepted at the newly founded summer Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, in 1940, where he studied composition with Paul Hindemith and conducting with Serge Koussevitzky. He was one of Koussevitzky’s wunderkinder, the other being Leonard Bernstein. He became Koussevitzky’s assistant two years later.

Foss’s early compositions were tonal, Romantic or neoclassical in style and eclectic, and he could move comfortably among musical styles. He came under the influence of Igor Stravinsky while studying with Hindemith at Yale in 1940 and 1941.

Foss became an American citizen in 1942, and he composed The Prairie (1942), an oratorio based on Carl Sandburg’s poems. It is Foss’s contribution to musical Americana. A suite from it was premiered by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Foss became the orchestra’s official pianist in 1944 after performing his own first piano concerto.

Life’s Work

In 1946, Koussevitzky appointed Foss, who was receiving commissions to compose, to teach at the Berkshire Music Center. His international reputation grew when he performed the premiere of his second piano concerto in Venice in 1951.

The center for Foss’s career changed to Southern California in 1953 when he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, to teach composition and conducting. He began conducting a hugely popular and successful series of six-hour marathon concerts devoted to a single composer at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

His interests took a turn toward the avant-garde in 1956 when he began experiments in controlled improvisation for small chamber ensembles. Giving classically trained performers the chance to improvise, he believed, would allow them freedom and a means to bridge the gap between composer and performer. Instead of relying on detailed scores, these performances involved the use of charts, graphs, and diagrams to guide the performers. His Improvisation Chamber Ensemble toured the United States in 1960 and helped spread this innovative idea. Foss later abandoned group improvisations, finding that they had become safe and comfortable and no longer adventurous.

When Foss returned to composing fully notated scores, his works nonetheless incorporated techniques he learned from improvising, as well as atonality, serialism (twelve-tone technique), synthesizers, taped music, chance, and minimalism. His experimental composition for soprano and orchestra, Time Cycle (1960), is his major chamber composition, and it established him as a leading contemporary experimental composer. In the 1980’s, however, his works took a conservative, perhaps more listener-friendly turn.

In 1963, Foss became conductor and music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Although it was agreed the programming should be mostly standard classical works, Foss quickly began preparing a mixture of new and classical music. He gave American and world premieres of important works by Anton Webern, Krzysztof Penderecki, Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis.

In the same year, Foss became codirector of the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at State University of New York, Buffalo, which encouraged conventionally trained young performers to pursue careers in avant-garde music. The concerts, given in Buffalo and New York City, offered the newest music of the experimental avant-garde.

Through the orchestra’s programming, recordings, and the Festivals of the Arts Today in Buffalo, Foss and the Buffalo Philharmonic were known internationally as major advocates and promoters of modern, experimental music. However, because of his programming of modern music, Foss’s popularity with some of the local Buffalo audiences suffered, and he found himself defending his musical programming on local TV. While at Buffalo, Foss continued to teach at Tanglewood, conduct internationally, and compose. His tenure at Buffalo ended in 1968.

In 1971, he became director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. Foss transformed what was a community orchestra into a professional, virtuoso orchestra, whose performers were drawn from the freelancers and the teachers of the metropolitan New York area. Again, Foss’s innovative programming, designed to attract New Yorkers to Brooklyn, included marathon concerts, a series Meet the Moderns, and premieres of modern works by Darius Milhaud, Ned Rorem, and William Bolcom. Foss continued teaching, at Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

From 1972 to 1976 Foss served as conductor and music adviser of the Jerusalem Symphony, traveling to Israel up to seven times a year. Between 1981 and 1986 Foss was conductor and music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. As he had done in Brooklyn, Foss improved the quality of the orchestra and took it on a European tour in 1986. In 1984, he planned a Festival of American Sacred Music, which encompassed genres from classical to American Indian. Held in venues throughout the city, the festival presented world premieres of works by David Del Tredici, John Corigliano, and John Adams. Foss resigned his position at Brooklyn in 1990, and he continued to compose, direct festivals, and conduct internationally until his death from a heart attack in 2009.

Significance

Foss was an enthusiastic champion of American music and the compositions of the twentieth century’s leading modern composers. He was leading figure in the 1960’s avant-garde musical scene with his Improvisation Chamber Ensemble and his own compositions. Although he never held the directorship of a major orchestra, as a conductor he improved those he did direct, and he used those positions to promote American and modern music.

Bibliography

Gagne, Cole, and Tracy Caras. “Lukas Foss.” In Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982. Interview in which Foss discusses some of his major works and his approach to composition.

Kozinn, Allan. “Lukas Foss, Composer at Home in Many Stylistic Currents, Dies at Eighty-Six.” New York Times, February 2, 2009, D10. Summary of Foss’s life and achievements.

Mellers, Wilfred. “Today and Tomorrow: Lukas Foss and the Younger Generation.” In Music in a New Found Land. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964. Appreciative account of Foss’s experiments in improvisation and his early experimental avant-garde compositions.

Perone, Karen J. Lukas Foss: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Essential guide for Foss; contains biography and extensive listing of articles, compositions, and recordings.