Arts and Letters

Douglas Moore was born in 1893 in Cutchogue, Long Island, a village on the North Fork of Peconic Bay in the Town of Southold. He died in Greenport, of the same Town, on July 25, 1969. His people had come from New Haven to Southold Town in 1640 and for the most part they are all buried there. Douglas's father, one of the first to leave the land, moved to New York and engaged in publishing. Winters he lived in Brooklyn in a house designed by Stanford White, and that is where Douglas grew up and from where he went off to school at Hotchkiss, then to Yale. There he wrote college songs, among which, I believe "Good Night, Harvard" is still in use, studied composition with Horatio Parker, whom he enjoyed, and with David Stanley Smith, whom he did not. In the Navy, he seems also to have written songs and to have had something to do with bands. He also, in some postwar Navy connection, got to Paris, where he studied with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum and had organ lessons from Charles Tournemire. Rare among American composers of his time, he did not become addicted to Nadia Boulanger, though he gave her a try.

Beginning in 1921, as organist and Director of Music at the Cleveland Museum, he studied composition with Ernest Bloch and remained in that city for four years.

In 1926, after another European year, he joined the music faculty of Columbia University, becoming head of it in 1940 and the Edward MacDowell Professor in 1945, succeeding in that post Daniel Gregory Mason. He retired in 1962.

Douglas wrote his first opera in 1935, White Wings, on a libretto by Philip Barry derived from Barry's play of that name. In all, he composed six full-length operas and four short ones. Among the short ones The Emperor's New Clothes, written for children, has enjoyed constant success. And among the longer ones two—The Devil and Daniel Webster (with a text by Stephen Vincent Benét) and The Ballad of Baby Doe (to a text of John Latouche)—have become repertory works. His last opera, Carrie Nation, may have a fighting chance to outlast the others, for its music is to my mind his finest, though its literature cannot compare for easy interest with the ghost-story involving Webster and the faithful charmer Baby Doe with her Colorado mining tycoon.

Moore's symphonic and chamber music are also of high quality—especially the early Pageant of P. T. Barnum, from 1924, the Symphony in A major, 1945, and the Farm Journal, of ’47. Among his chamber music the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, of 1946, has always seemed to me remarkably fine. It has structure, it sounds good, and it is expressive.

Expressivity runs high, as a matter of fact, in all of Douglas Moore's music. It is the straightforwardness of his sentiments, plus a maximum of attractive sound and a minimum of fuss, that gives his music distinction. Also his true gift for the stage, a sens du théâtre rare among today's serious composers.

Douglas Moore received his due of honors—Pulitzer Awards and Guggenheim Fellowships, honorary degrees and the like. But he was no less a giver away of services. Elected to the Institute in 1941, he was its President from '46 to '52; and similarly, joining the Academy in '51, he was our President from '59 to '62. In both posts he was active, sagacious, and beneficial. So was he also as a director of ASCAP.

Douglas was in fact an inveterate and valued board member, having served in this capacity a dozen or more societies and foundations. And everywhere he established a tone of tactful frankness, of fairness to all possible beneficiaries, and of disinterested enlightenment.

It was my privilege often to sit with him in such groups, and I was forever impressed by the openness of his mind and the warmth of his heart. His death last summer at seventy-five has deprived our country and us all of not only a valued composer, a real one, but also an irreplaceable citizen.

His music will long remain. But not soon shall we see his equal as a loyal and wise colleague.