Kirke Mechem

Kirke Mechem (b. 1925) is a prolific American composer of classical music, and a writer. He is often called the “dean of American choral music”; his first opera, Tartuffe, with more that 350 performances in six countries, has become one of the most popular operas ever written by an American. He has written more than 250 works in almost every genre. In 2002, ASCAP registered performances of his music in 42 countries.

Biography

Mechem was born August 16, 1925 in Wichita, Kansas. His family moved to Topeka when he was five. His father was a writer of published novels, plays and poetry and was director of the Kansas State Historical Society. His mother was a German-trained concert pianist. Mechem began studying piano with his mother at an early age but was more interested in sports. He later worked for a time as a sports reporter for the Topeka Daily Capital. He played popular music by ear and at age seventeen began writing what he describes as “stacks of wretched songs.” During World War II he served two and half years in the army, then enrolled at Stanford University as an English major, intending to follow in his father’s footsteps as a writer. Out of curiosity he took a harmony course taught by Harold Schmidt, the choral director, who later became the principal influence on his development as a choral composer and conductor. He continued his study of harmony and counterpoint, changing his major to music at the end of his junior year. His principal teachers at Stanford were Leonard Ratner (harmony, counterpoint) and Sandor Salgo (orchestration and conducting). In his senior year, Mechem orchestrated and conducted the student variety show. He earned a masters degree at Harvard in 1953, studying composition with Walter Piston and Randall Thompson, and was winner of the Boott Prize for vocal composition. He was assistant choral director for three years at Stanford, composing both choral and instrumental music and conducting an opera. He lived in Vienna, Austria in 1956-57 and 1961-63. During his first year there he turned down a teaching and conducting post at Harvard in order to devote as much time as possible to composition. In 1963 Mechem returned to the Bay Area with his wife and children and settled into the house in San Francisco where he still lives. He became composer-in-residence at the University of San Francisco and has also taught at many other universities as a guest composer and conductor. In the early 1970s Mechem and his family moved to London for a year.

Career

Most of Mechem’s early work was for chorus. Some of these pieces, composed as an undergraduate and graduate student, were published and have become staples of the choral literature; e.g. “Make A Joyful Noise,” (recorded by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) and “Give Thanks Unto The Lord.” The latter won the tri-annual SAI American Music Award and helped thrust Mechem’s choral work into prominence. His Opus 5 was a "Suite for Piano", later followed by a "Piano Sonata" and a book of teaching pieces called "Whims". In Vienna he began writing chamber music. His "Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano" was followed by a "Divertimento for Flute and String Trio", and by his first "String Quartet", which was the only American prize-winner at the fourth International Concourse for Composition in Monaco.

Mechem’s first major orchestral success was the 1965 San Francisco Symphony premiere of his "Symphony No. 1" under Josef Krips, who called the work “one of the world’s great pieces of music” (Associated Press). Krips commissioned Mechem to write a "Second Symphony", which he premiered in 1967 with such success that he repeated it two years later.

Mechem wrote many commissioned choral suites, cantatas and other vocal works during the early 1970s. Seven doctoral dissertations have been written about his choral music. In the 70s he saw a performance of Moliere’s classic satire, Tartuffe, which inspired him to write his first opera. He wrote his own libretto, as he does for all his operas. Premiered in 1980 by the San Francisco Opera, "Tartuffe" was an immediate hit and has since played to audiences in Canada, China, Russia, Austria and Germany, as well as in the USA. "Opera Now" (London), reviewing the Vienna production, called the work “a delight, a deft, glimmering, witty score” and praised Mechem’s “distinctive voice…a genuine flair for theater and an acute understanding of comedy.” In 1998 the National Opera Association presented Mechem with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

The success of "Tartuffe" encouraged Mechem to embark upon his most ambitious work, an opera based on the life of the controversial abolitionist, John Brown. An essay Mechem wrote for the American Music Center’s online magazine, "New Music Box", describes the long evolution of this work. The premiere of "John Brown" did not take place until 2008, when Lyric Opera Kansas City scored “the sort of magical success that composers and musicians dream of” (Kansas City Star), at which “the crowd leapt to its feet and clapped so long and hard that hands grew sore” (Pitch.com). In the twenty-some years between" John Brown"’s inception and premiere, Mechem wrote many other compositions, including two new operas: "The Newport Rivals", based upon Sheridan’s classic play The Rivals; and Pride and Prejudice, on Jane Austen’s famous novel. Both have been tried out in workshops and are presently (2008) being prepared for professional premieres. Mechem’s "Songs of The Slave", a suite from "John Brown", had its full premiere in 1994 and has enjoyed more than 70 performances.

In 1990 Mechem made his first of three trips to Russia, then still the Soviet Union. That year he was a guest of honor at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, and was invited back for an “enormously successful” (Pravda) all-Mechem symphonic concert by the USSR Radio-Television Orchestra in March, 1991—the first time a Soviet orchestra had devoted an entire concert to a living American composer. Five years later he was invited to attend the Russian-language premiere of "Tartuffe" by the Mussorgsky National Theater for Opera and Ballet in St. Petersburg.Throughout his career Mechem continued to write a large number of commissioned choral works. In 2007 the American Choral Directors Association celebrated his 50 years of choral publications with a retrospective concert at its national convention.

From the composer

“As a child I often went to sleep listening to my mother practice the piano. She played at least one recital or concerto every year and we children understood that these were important events. She was a devout Presbyterian, my father an atheist, and they respected each other’s beliefs unreservedly. The common spiritual force in our family was music. In my adolescence, my confusions or griefs were assuaged by putting on a record of Ravel, Rachmaninov or Bach. Though I do not share my mother’s religious beliefs, the great poetry of the Old Testament and the great music it has inspired through the centuries touch the deepest part of my being because it connects me with my mother. But it also connects me with my father, who was a fine poet (I have set many of his poems to music), and who loved my mother through music just as all of their children did.

“Is it any wonder then that I should regard music as something almost sacred? I do not mean sacred in a religious sense. I mean it in the sense that one would say truth is sacred, life is sacred. They are not to be mocked. While I love to laugh at hypocrisy, and love humor almost anywhere I find it, I am overly sensitive when I hear what I perceive as the trivialization or brutalization of music, or what was common practice in the 20th century — deliberately making it unintelligible to most music-lovers. This wonderful art has room for endless variety, from lighthearted to tragic, from Western to Eastern and everything in between. Each person has a right to his or her own taste, and I recognize that just as we all come from different backgrounds, we all have different ways of listening.

“And so I readily admit that my own background has conditioned what I look for in a new piece of music, whether my own, or someone else’s. I don’t want to find new music “interesting” in a purely intellectual way; I am impatient with novelty or experimentation for their own sake; I am too old to be taken in by trends or jargon. Been there, heard that. I want to "love" a piece of music, to be delighted by it, to be moved to tears or laughter or in some way taken out of myself. At the very least I must want to hear the piece again, the sooner the better. We composers are speaking a very old language. The new ways in which we speak must be understood by our contemporaries. Otherwise, we are simply spinning our wheels, and music becomes just another plaything, a hobby, an elitist way of putting down the uninitiated. I prefer it to be the magnificent source of joy, consolation, beauty, ingenuity, and inspiration that it has been for generations, and was in my own family.”

References/bibliography

"Composers on Composing for Choir", Tom Wine, ed., GIA, 2007.Much of the information for this article was drawn from the “Kirke Mechem” chapter, pp 83-119. The chapter also includes several articles on music written previously by Mechem:
*“The Text Trap,” first published in the "Choral Journal", November, 2003
*“Commissioning New Choral Music,” a checklist prepared for ACDA
*“Alienation and Entertainment,” first published in the Choral Journal, March,1973; republished, March, 1998.

Interview about "Tartuffe" with Hannah Williams, University of Michigan, A"merican Music Institute", "Living Music Project", October 30,2004. [http://sitemaker.umich.edu/livingmusic/view_by_scene&value1=Opera&value2=Opera&config=AjZQKet7kCtJnbxIIhabrM&mode=single&sortDirection0=Ascending&column2=scenethree&recordID=206042&comparisonType0=contains+(text+only)&comparisonType1=contains+(text+only)&comparisonType2=contains+(text+only)&sortDirection1=Ascending&sortDirection2=Descending&nextMode=list&joinCondition2=OR&joinCondition1=OR&column0=scene&column1=scenetwo&sortColumn0=informantlastname&sortColumn1=informantfirstandmiddlename&sortColumn2=date&value0=Opera#interview]

Interview for program notes of "San Francisco Choral Society", Carol Talbeck, 2007. [http://www.sfchoral.org/pnotes/mechem.html]

Kirke Mechem, “An American Opera Network,” in "Perspectives: Creating and Producing Contemporary Opera and Musical Theater", Opera America, 1983, revised and reprinted in "Encore" magazine, Opera America, 1999.

Kirke Mechem, “Confessions of A Hymn Bandit: The Amazing Case of ‘Blow Ye The Trumpet’”, Chorus America "VOICE", Spring, 2004.

Kirke Mechem, “The Chronic Crisis,” remarks for the Music Critics Association of North America, published in San Francisco Classical Voice, August 5, 2003.

External links

* [http://www.kirkemechem.com/] - complete catalog of Mechem’s music; links to reviews.
* [http://www.schirmer.com/Default.aspx?TabId=2419&State_2872=2&composerId_2872=1033] – Schirmer's Mechem pages.
* http://www.kcopera.org/pdf/John_Brown_Afterword.pdf - KM article: “Why John Brown?”
* [http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5601] - KM article: “"John Brown": Evolution of An Opera.”

Trivia

Kirke Mechem's name has occasionally been misspelled "Mecham," though the correct spelling is "Mechem."

The composer's middle name is Lewis. His father, the writer and historian, was Kirke Field Mechem (1889-1985). As their middle names were different and as they were in different fields, they rarely used the suffix "Sr." or "Jr." In this article, "Mechem" always refers to the composer.

As a young sports reporter Mechem once interviewed Joe Louis. When all he could think of to ask the former heavyweight champion was “How do you like Topeka, Joe?” he decided he was not cut out to be a newspaperman.

Mechem married Randall Thompson’s niece, Donata Coletti, daughter of the Boston sculptor,Joseph Coletti. They have four children.

He was captain of the Stanford tennis team; during the summers he won a number of state championships as a touring player. He claims to be the only person alive who has played tennis with both Bill Tilden (Mechem was 12) and Billie Jean King (he was an early mentor of her doubles partner, Rosie Casals, in San Francisco.)

Mechem was editor of the Topeka High School newspaper, "The World", and active in drama and sports, but not music. His father also attended Topeka High, and in his twenties was a member of the male quartet that sang for President William Howard Taft in a program that dedicated the new Memorial Building in Topeka.

Much of this information was obtained directly from the composer and from examination of his high school yearbooks in the Topeka High Historical Society Room.