Arts and Letters

Ezra Laderman was born on June 29, 1924 and he died on the 28th of February, 2015. He was born in Brooklyn and he loved the Dodgers. His parents, Isidor and Leah, immigrated to the United States from Poland. Though poor, the family had a piano. I’m going to read as much as possible from Ezra’s own words. “At four, I was improvising at the piano; at seven, I began to compose music, writing it down. I hardly knew it then, but I had at a very early age made a giant step to becoming a composer.”

Ezra graduated from New York City’s High School of Music and Art in 1941, in one of the first classes. Remarkably, on April 25, 1943, Ezra was inducted into the United States Army, where he served as a radio operator with the 69th Infantry Division during World War II. He wrote about his experience:

We were in Caversham, England, poised to enter the war. It was here that I learned that my brother, Jack, had been shot down and killed in Germany. The Battle of the Bulge, crossing the Rhine at Remagen, liberating Leipzig, meeting the Russians at Torgau on the bank of the Elbe were the points in this constellation that was filled with tension and waiting, victory and grief. We became aware of the horror, and what we now call the 'holocaust,' while freeing Leipzig.

In the weeks following the conclusion of the war, Ezra composed his Leipzig Symphony. The work brought him recognition in the army, and he was subsequently assigned as an orchestrator of the G.I. Symphony Orchestra. He finally left the Army in 1946. I can say, as a friend, his experiences in the army in which he served extraordinarily bravely were very passionately kept to himself, and it took a lot to get them out of him.

Ezra went on to study composition with Stepan Wolpe in New York and Miriam Gideon at Brooklyn College. He had interesting stories to tell about studying with Wolpe, a German immigrant and quite a remarkable composer himself. He was in a class with Morton Feldman, no less, also a Music and Art graduate.

Ezra’s compositions ranged from solo instrumental and vocal works to large-scale choral and orchestral music. He wrote music for the Academy Award films, The Eleanor Roosevelt Story and Black Fox. Some of you are old enough to remember his work on the Sunday television programs called Look Up and Live and Lamp Unto My Feet. I certainly remember them because some of the first new music I’d ever heard in my life was on those Sunday morning CBS shows.

Ezra was commissioned many times by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the National, Louisville, Chicago Symphony, as well as New York Philharmonic, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, and many, many other great American orchestras. He wrote many string quartets—twelve—and we can say that they cover the entire range of musical expression of the mid-20th century, from early works that were tonal, to middle works that were completely not tonal, and then ending with a remarkable synthesis that was Ezra’s own, final style.

In 1991, he was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and some of you will know that he was President here at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected in 2006 to that role and concluded it in 2009. Until June 2014, Ezra taught music and composition at Yale University School of Music. He was Dean of the School of Music from 1989 and served in that position until 1995 after which became my beloved colleague in the composition program.

Ezra spoke of his own creative path as an arch. He said, “When I was very young, everything I wrote was tonal; and after that, atonal; and then serial. Finally, I’ve come back to tonality—but in a synthesized form, with the freedom to call upon all techniques.” He was led toward this synthesis in 1975 when he wrote an organ piece and composed a set of preludes in many different styles. When he heard these preludes performed, he wrote, “Why segregate these aesthetic elements?” He described that realization as nothing short of “traumatic... It changed my life.”

While raising his family, Ezra lived in Teaneck, New Jersey, and later moved with his wife, Aimlee, to New Haven, Connecticut. They spent summers in Woods Hole, where Aimlee was a scientist and remains a scientist to this day. He got involved with the whole scientific community—his interest was wide-ranging in that regard—and was a supporter of art production there, too.

Ezra died at the age of 90. He was active until the very end of his life. At the very end of his life, like that other great, consummate artist William Blake, Ezra was involved, along with the poet Robert Pinsky, in creating a musical version of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I’d like to conclude with a little research I did that proved quite significant to me. I found the yearbook of the High School of Music and Art for 1941. There’s a picture of Ezra in the yearbook (with hair!). Underneath is a little line that says, “Though this fellow’s music will certainly charm, his smile is the thing that will ring the alarm.”

Ezra’s smile still rings.