Arts and Letters

"So knowing, almost licentious: he starts something, then veers off to something else—goes from decadence to wide-eyed wondrous music in a single phrase." This is Jacob Druckman describing one of his favorite composers, Claude Debussy. But as is often the case, when an artist speaks about another artist, it might be about affinities, common terrain.

Druckman's music shares many qualities with Debussy's: it values intuition before intellect, it creates a luxurious world of intricately detailed sound whose origins are direct and primitive.

Even back in the '60s, when Druckman won his spurs as a certified avant garde composer, it was the shocking sensuality of his instrumental textures that set him apart. The elusive and magical feathering out of even the most dramatic gestures is inseparable from the notes themselves—it isn't orchestration, it is the way this composer creates the color and atmosphere that tells his story—that finds, in his words—“what is closest to my own center, my own truth."

In the last ten years especially, Druckman became what he called "a musical fundamentalist," affirming "tonality as a universal principle." Paradoxically, his vision seemed to become even more fanciful, and the sensuality took on a kind of philosophical dimension. These last pieces, especially the comprehensive chamber piece, Come Round, summarize, and enlarge upon the Druckman vocabulary. To the characteristic brilliance and arabesque is added more sober, monumental, mysterious dimensions, the tonalism providing an anchor for new speculation in the realm of form.

Druckman is deservedly known as a teacher, and the diversity of his many Yale students testifies to his fair, open, and encouraging disposition. These same qualities were available to his colleagues: Jacob was one of those rare ones who genuinely enjoyed other people's music. He possessed the generosity of someone whose own creative house was in order, who always had something left to give for the health and survival of the musical culture.

Generous, tough, raffish, sophisticated, elusive, earthy—in not every composer do the music and the man so openly share the same qualities. Now we should hear some of that music.

In 1989 Druckman wrote a brief Shakespeare song for one of his dearest colleagues, Jan de Gaetani, who was then terminally ill with leukemia. Its text concluded "Never harm / Nor spell, nor charm / Come our lovely lady nigh; So good night, with lullaby." Later he imbedded the song in an incantatory and mercurial orchestra piece, one of my favorites of his pieces, and, I believe, one of his as well. We'll conclude with the first few minutes of Druckman's Nor Spell, Nor Charm.