Lukas Foss

BPO Music Director: 1963-70

As a fifteen-year-old prodigy, Lukas Foss arrived in America in 1937, where he enrolled at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. By that time he had already been composing for eight years, with lessons in his native Berlin with his first piano teacher, Julius Herford Goldstein. After his family fled Nazi Germany in 1933, Foss studied piano, flute, composition and orchestration at the Paris Conservatory with Lazare Lévy, Louis Moyse, Noel Gallon and Felix Wolfes, respectively. At Curtis his teachers included Fritz Reiner (conducting) and Isabelle Vengerova (piano). Foss was yet 15 when G. Schirmer issued his first published work, a series of piano pieces composed mostly on the New York subway. By the age of 18, the wunderkind graduated with honors from Curtis and began advanced study in conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood and composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale University.

Foss soon displayed his mature gifts as an all-around musician who enjoyed equal celebrity as a composer, conductor, pianist, educator, and spokesman for new music. In the course of his long career, he taught composition at Tanglewood and was composer-in-residence at Harvard, the Manhattan School of Music, Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University and Boston University. In 1983 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and served as its Vice Chancellor in the late 1980s. He was also the recipient of eight honorary doctorates.

As a composer, Foss embraced contemporary musical languages and produced a catalog of well over one hundred works, which Aaron Copland described as “among the most original and stimulating compositions in American music.”

In 1953 at age 31, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as Professor of Composition at the University of California at Los Angeles, becoming the youngest full professor ever hired there. While at that post, experiments in performance with his newly-founded Improvisation Chamber Ensemble led to new compositions like Time Cycle for soprano and orchestra – a setting of texts about time by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, which was premiered by his friend Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. In turn, Foss blended his experimental instincts with tradition in Echoi in 1963 – a work for four virtuosi – which is now widely considered as one of the chamber masterworks of the 20th century. Among his best-known orchestral works are the Baroque Variations, Piano Concerto No.2 and the Renaissance Concerto for flute, in addition to the children’s operas Griffelkin and The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and a considerable body of vocal work.

As a conductor, Foss directed most of America’s major symphony orchestras including those of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and the New York Philharmonic, the latter of which he led in the premiere of Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story at Carnegie Hall. Abroad, he led the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leningrad Symphony, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome and the Tokyo Philharmonic, among others.

After Josef Krips resigned his Buffalo post for the San Francisco Symphony, the stage was set for creative lightning when Foss was named as the Music Director of the BPO. At the opening concert of the 1963-64 season the walls of Kleinhans shook for the first time with the flash and peal of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Little did anyone realize that even ‘Le Sacre’ would be ‘old hat’ in a hurry. Within three seasons, the BPO led the world in the performance of new music.

Under Foss’ direction, the BPO was invited to Carnegie Hall for the first of what became regular appearances there. Its first truly major recordings were made on the Nonesuch label featuring the music of Sibelius, Cage, Penderecki, Xenakis and Ruggles. Moreover, the BPO’s first nationwide TV appearances were broadcast on PBS with Stockhausen’s Momentum and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, after which followed a variety of major tours, including two with Arthur Fiedler and his ‘Pops’ repertoire. Then, in a misty rain in 1970, maestro Foss shared the dais with then-governor Nelson Rockefeller at the ground breaking of Artpark, the declared permanent summer home of the BPO. They were heady times for the orchestra indeed.

In addition to his work with the BPO, Foss founded and became Director of the University at Buffalo Center for Creative and Performing Arts, to which he invited many contemporary music composers and musicians to hone their craft, collaborate, and perform in his “Evenings for New Music” concerts at the Albright-Knox auditorium. These Creative Associates, as they were called, included John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Philip Glass, and many more. By bringing his passion for contemporary music to Buffalo, Foss transformed the city into a global center for experimentation in music composition and performance from the 1960s to the 1980s.

After his last year in Buffalo in 1970, Foss served as Music Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 1971 to 1990, Musical Adviser of the Jerusalem Symphony from 1972 to 1976, and Music Director of the Milwaukee Symphony from 1981 to 1986. In 1991, he joined Boston University’s faculty as a professor of music theory and composition. His conducting activities continued with many guest appearances around the world late into his life.