Kenneth John LaFave: A Bio in the Form of a Self-Interview
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So, tell me a little about yourself.
How little? As little as possible?
As much as is required.
Okay. I was born in Tucson, Arizona, amid mountains and cacti, came to love music as a child, eventually earned a couple of music degrees at the local state university and moved to New York City at 26, ready to take on the real world, to scale the heights as a composer, to find my voice….
And?
It didn’t quite work out as planned. After eight years I was back in Arizona, mostly for personal reasons, but in that brief span I managed to fill positions in New York music publishing and as a publicist for the New York Philharmonic. In the early ‘80s, I was assistant to the director of publications at Edward B. Marks music publishing firm. I did a little bit of everything, from proof-reading to writing press releases. The real-world status of “classical music” was made clear to me on an occasion when I was proofing a one-act opera called The Trial of Lucullus by the composer Roger Sessions. Sessions was one of the great names in mid-20th century classical music and I was very happy to have the assignment. But I was interrupted in my progress when the director rushed into my little office with an urgent plea: Would I please turn my attention to finishing and proofing the matchbook to Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell? A matchbook in music publishing parlance is a vocal-piano score taken from a rock or pop album. The arranger-editor has to approximate – match – the harmonies, etc., of the original with just piano and a singer. Roger Sessions may have been in the music-history books, but he was quickly brushed aside for Bat Out of Hell. This was freaking Meat Loaf for crying out loud!
Tell me about the New York Philharmonic.
That was 1985-87. Leonard Bernstein was Conductor Laureate. I got to sit in on rehearsals of Lenny conducting Mahler and Copland and Bernstein. It was as close to musical heaven as I ever hope to get. And yes, contrary to the “Maestro” character on Seinfeld, Bernstein asked everyone to call him “Lenny.”
What was he like?
I met him but barely knew him. The most time we ever spent talking was during a dinner party at the home of Phillip Ramey, program annotator for the Philharmonic. The single most important American classical musician of the 20th century was casual, pleasant, and easy to chat with – at least between puffs on those endless cigarettes. Lenny was also remarkably open in his opinions. Carmina Burana was “gilded shit.” Movements for Piano and Orchestra, a late-period Stravinsky piece, was similarly condemned, but minus the gilt. My most beautiful memory of him happened at what was then Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. It was five minutes to concert time for a performance of Mahler Seven and no one knew where Bernstein was. Not in his dressing room, not in the wings. Where? After two or three frantic minutes of searching, I found him in a dimly lit corner of the backstage area, talking about Mahler to a mesmerized, if slightly confused, janitor. That was Lenny, the constant teacher. Amazingly, in June of 1987, through some chance encounters, I got to play drums for the workshop production of what would have been Bernstein’s last musical, The Race to Urga. Alas, the show did not go beyond workshop. But the Lenny connection continued, and many years later, in 2014, I published my book, Experiencing Leonard Bernstein (Rowman & Littlefield), which is, to this date (2023), the only English-language book in my knowledge devoted solely to examining Bernstein’s compositions.
So, you’ve implied that New York was not what you’d expected.
It was better, actually. More magical than I could have imagined. But it was also harsh. New York is no place to be young and struggling, which is ironic because at least half the people there are precisely that. I never rose above the status of an underling in the classical music world, and I sometimes found myself with two bucks and a subway token until the next paycheck. And yet, the one thing that happened for me there as a composer was the most important thing that could have happened: I really did find my voice. That much came true.
Please explain.
Ken (far right) with Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland (1981)
Childhood discovery
To do that, we’ll have to go back to Arizona and my little-boy-hood. I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s in a household not exactly flooded with music. No one in my family – not my mom or my dad or older brother and sister – played a classical instrument, nor was classical music heard in our house. Older brother, in the spirit of the age, sang and played a bit of guitar in a local band. His favorite artists were Elvis and the Everly Brothers. My parents’ tastes were a bit more traditional, and I leaned in their direction. I remember them (and me with them as a little tyke) never missing the Nat King Cole Show on TV. I sensed even then that there was something special about that man’s silken voice. But it was a single song recorded by an artist who is today all but forgotten that grabbed me and set me on the path to music. The singer was African American crooner Tommy Edwards, and the song was It’s All in the Game. The composer: Charles G. Dawes, Vice-President of the United States under President Calvin Coolidge. Don’t believe me? Look up the song title in Wikipedia. Quoting from that article: “(It’s All in the Game) is the only No. 1 single in the U.S. to have been co-written by a U.S. Vice President or a Nobel Peace Prize laureate (Dawes was both).” Of course, I didn’t know that. I probably didn’t even know what a “vice-president” was. But I knew one moment in that song contained some kind of mystery. The mystery shows itself in the music where the words of the lyric are, “And your future’s looking grim,” which is a bit unfortunate because there’s nothing grim about the music. What happens there is, is….
Is what?
…is the surprising appearance of a secondary dominant chord that pulls the melody gently into the dominant key, followed by an intricate return to the tonic, completed on the word “above.”
Wow.
Yeah, I know. The challenge in talking about music is describing it without using theoretical language. It’s nearly impossible. Music must be experienced. Just listen to It’s All in the Game with special attention to that part and its return (slightly altered) near the end on the sweeter words, “And caress your waiting fingertips,” to see – to hear – what I mean. What I felt at age 6 or 7 hearing those moments thrilled me, but I would not have been able to put the thrill into words – certainly not words like “tonic” and “secondary dominant”! If I had been able to verbalize my feeling, the words would have been something like, “Connection … infinity … everything touches everything else.” Three-chord songs such as those that make up much folk music and rock ‘n’ roll are wonderful. They are like being at home and planting deep roots. But songs that go beyond the standard harmonies are like walking over the crest of a hill you’ve never climbed before, getting on a train going you-don’t-know-where, or meeting new people in a strange land. As I grew up and took piano lessons and studied music theory, I began to understand the mechanics of making this sort of music – the tonics and secondary dominants and so on. But the challenge before me as a composer was to use this knowledge to make music that sounded like me – not like the myriad other, far greater composers who had come before – and was appealing to listeners.
How does New York fit in?
That’s where it all came together. The pieces I composed as a graduate student at the University of Arizona were a little bit Copland, a touch Debussy, a dash Stravinsky. Where was “LaFave”? LaFave had to be in some personal vision of that feeling of infinity I had started to sense in It’s All in the Game and was now hearing in J.S. Bach, W. A. Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, not to mention Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Simon, Lennon & McCartney, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans. Logically enough, the vision of musical infinity is expressed in infinite ways. My way was waiting inside a certain relationship of neighboring tones, or minor seconds as they are called in music theory. I couldn’t make that relationship come alive in Tucson because Tucson was my home. It was only three chords. But New York was all 24 major and minor chords – at once! In 1982, I decided to compose a choral setting of the Latin mass. (My religious background is Roman Catholic.) The Kyrie, the Gloria, and the word-heavy Credo took after Stravinsky a bit – maybe more than a bit. Then came the Sanctus. “Holy, Holy, Holy” needed something different. I sat at the piano in the Upper West Side apartment I shared with three other people, and in a single evening, the music arrived from wherever it is music comes from. With that, I believe I established a voice of my own. This particular relationship of minor seconds shows up in different ways in three of my five orchestral pieces dedicated to The Muses: Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy; Erato, Muse of Love Poetry; and Polyhymnia, Muse of Hymns to the Gods. You can hear Melpomene on my scores and recordings page.
This minor-second thing – it’s not in all your works? Shouldn’t it be, if it’s your “voice”?
I’d say it sparked my voice, setting a sort of framework for my style. But that doesn’t mean it equals my entire style. Other elements make their entrances. An artistic voice can contain multitudes, to be Walt Whitman-ish about it.
Ken visiting the grave of Igor Stravinsky, Venice 2013
Little Kenny discovers music, mid-1950s
Ned Rorem and beyond
My growth from student composer to professional concluded in 1984 with tutelage from one of New York’s most famous musicians and personalities of the day, though I had to go to Florida to study with him. Ned Rorem was known as much for his candid diaries as for his music, which included an enormous catalogue of art song, plus chamber and orchestral scores, and the opera he worked all his life to compose and get produced, Our Town. That these works by a once-famous, Pulitzer Prize-winner have all but disappeared from the repertoire in this century should give composers pause. Increasingly, it seems that the classical canon will forever consist of Bach/Handel through Stravinsky/Shostakovich, with living composers providing temporary refreshers here and there, like sorbets between the courses of a meal. Anyway, I won a fellowship to study with Ned at a wonderful place in Florida called The Atlantic Center for the Arts in February and March of 1984. The idea at the Center was to hire one music professional, one visual artist, and one poet or fiction writer, then assign students to each and let the student musicians, writers, and visual artists mingle in order to learn from each other’s art as well as from masters of their own. It’s a great idea and I hope the place is still there.
What was Rorem’s teaching style?
Ned taught art song exclusively. He’d assign a single poem to his students (there were six of us) in the afternoon, tasking each one with setting it to music by the next morning. We were all quartered in little houses equipped with pianos, and at night you could hear the other students writing their songs as you tried to write yours. The next morning, we would give Ned our songs (in manuscript, of course, there not yet being any music software, or software of any kind for that matter) and, song by song, he would throw the vocal-piano score on the piano rack and sing and play it at sight. It’s astounding how different from one another six settings of the same poem can be. As Ned sang and played, he would occasionally stop, point to a phrase or measure and say, “That’s weak,” or “That’s strong.” He was invariably right, and the weak parts in my songs were always places where I had fudged a little and settled for something so-so. From this, I learned to trust my intuition about such spots. “Never write just any note,” Ned would often say. “The next note must be this one and not any other.” Those words should be framed and hung in every composer’s studio. During my time in Florida, I wrote some quirky little experimental songs on poems by Witter Bynner, a poet I had not known before, the beginnings of a cycle on poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the single song I still consider my best, Rain on Rahoon on the poem by James Joyce. You can listen to some of these songs on my scores and recordings page as well.
Was your career launched after the time with Rorem?
‘Fraid not. If by career you mean being employed to teach composition at a college or conservatory – the usual way composers make money – then no. Instead, I plunged into the allied profession or trade that has earned income for everyone from Robert Schumann to Virgil Thomson: music criticism. I had served as music critic for The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson while a graduate student at the University of Arizona but had put journalism aside when I moved to New York. Now I took it up again in the hope of making real money, for the other thing I did in 1984 was get married with the intent of founding a family, and that, as we all know, requires income. I left New York for Kansas City, MO, to be music and dance critic for The Kansas City Star, 1988-1990. This was short-lived, because my wife longed to return to Arizona, the state she was raised in, as I had been. In 1990, I was named “arts writer” for the small-circulation Phoenix Gazette, and in 1995 was promoted to music and dance critic for Phoenix’s larger paper, The Arizona Republic. I remained there until 2005. During this time, I kept composing. It was also during these years that I was given what I’ve found to be God’s greatest gift: children. 1991 brought my first son, Max, and 1994 his little brother, Emmett. Both boys are heir to the LaFave tradition of composing music. Emmett currently (2023) teaches music at a middle school while pursuing a singer-songwriter career. Listen to some of Emmett’s songs here. Max earns his income outside of music (smart lad) but is very active as a composer via electronic media. Listen to some of Max's pieces here.
I assume we’re approaching the end.
In some ways, it’s just the beginning. Sorry. I left the Republic in 2005 over policy differences, and since then have supported myself though teaching and freelance writing, the latter consisting largely of almost 200 program notes. (See PAGE.) The period 1990 to 2010 comprised my most prolific composing years. During this time, I composed among others the following pieces, all of which were performed, usually only once: Hermes: Concerto for Timpani and Strings; Closing Time, a cabaret opera in one scene; my sole String Quartet, commissioned with funds from the Arizona Commission on the Arts; American Avenues, a piano trio commissioned by Phoenix arts patrons Deborah and Richard Felder; Diet! The Musical; another musical, Outlaw Heart; Gateways, a concerto for electric guitar, choir and band, commissioned by Arizona State University; and an overture commissioned by The Tucson Symphony Orchestra in commemoration of its 75th anniversary, a work named one thing at its premiere in 2003, but now called Thalia: Muse of Comedy, as one of my short orchestral pieces named after the nine classical Greek Muses. The Muses series was largely made possible by the generosity and talent of the conductor Mischa Semanitzky. In 1987, Semanitzky had founded a summer music festival in Durango, Colorado, aptly named Music in the Mountains. There, between 1997 and 2004, Mischa gave the world premieres of Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy; Terpsichore, Muse of Dance; Polyhymnia, Muse of Hymns to the Gods; and what would become Thalia: Muse of Comedy. Euterpe: Muse of Lyric Poetry was premiered by yet another conductor who took the time to champion my music: Timothy Russell, director of orchestras at Arizona State University, who led the ASU Symphony Orchestra in Euterpe in 2002. Erato, Muse of Love Poetry has never been performed in concert, but there exists a highly polished studio recording of it.
I’ve been keeping count, and that’s just six muses. Where are the other three?
Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry is in a score for symphonic band and the other two are tossing about in my imagination. I saved the hardest for last: Clio, Muse of History, and Urania, Muse of Astronomy! Wish me luck. Before we end, I’d like to acknowledge one of the finest gentlemen I have ever known, Robert Kastenbaum. Bob was a psychologist on the ASU faculty and the author of several books that deserve wider reading, especially On Our Way, about the various death rituals engaged in by cultures around the world. Bob was the librettist for Closing Time, and he wrote the book and half the lyrics to Outlaw Heart. There was also a full-length LaFave-Kastenbaum opera that the ASU opera department picked up for production. I was thrilled! Little did I know that the project would be turned over to a student director and a student conductor, who managed to make a mess of it. One thing I have found over the decades is that students and amateurs can destroy a piece faster than Mozart wrote the overture to Marriage of Figaro. (Not all of them.) On the other hand, professionals can generally be trusted to make the most of a score. This was true in 2016, when oboist Steven Secan commissioned me to write a song cycle for mezzo-soprano, oboe, and piano. Steve was the oboist, of course, the mezzo-soprano was Kristin Dauphinais, and the pianist was her husband, Michael Dauphinais, both of them UA music faculty. The premiere performance had luster and verve. Alas, there was no recording. I may try to pull one together. Speaking of recordings, it’s ironic that I had waited much of my life for a piece or two by me to be represented on a commercial recording, but when that finally happened, it wasn’t a “classical” work that made the cut, but a song I co-wrote with Jessi Colter, a well-known singer-songwriter who had been married to the late country superstar Waylon Jennings. I met Jessi through our common membership at a gym, and she asked me to consider trying a collaboration. She was composing songs based on the Psalms of King David. We got together at her place, rife with memorabilia of Waylon, and played and sang phrases back and forth to each other. Over about two years, we co-wrote eight or nine songs based on various psalm texts. Only one of them, on the most popular of psalms, the 23rd, ended up on her 2017 Psalms project for Sony, but I was honored to be a part of it at all. The song can be heard here. I am credited in the description.
What are you working on now?
Primarily this website. I’ve composed a lot of music and unless I take action to preserve at least some of it, it will be swept out to sea the moment I shuffle off this you-know-what. As far as new pieces, I would like to finish the Muses series. I’ve never been happy with the ending of my string quartet and would like to revise it. And two of my collaborations with Bob Kastenbaum warrant new productions: Closing Time and Outlaw Heart.
What does your typical day look like in 2023? What pleases you and what disturbs you?
Ah, now we’re getting short on space, or pixels, or something. The end is near. In my mornings, I sip coffee, in the evenings, I pet my cat. In between, I play online chess and, five days a week, teach beginning and intermediate piano, as well as percussion and composition students. (My former composition students include Graham Cohen.) I am most pleased when one of my students grasps a musical concept. I am most disturbed when I view the implosion of Western civilization going on around me. But that would be a different website, devoted to philosophy and political thought. Did I mention I earned a PhD in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought from European Graduate School in 2017?
No.
Well, I did. My dissertation was published as The Sound of Ontology: Music as a Model for Metaphysics (2017, Lexington Books). Unsurprisingly, Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard lectures figure prominently in it. I should also mention another of my books, Experiencing Film Music (also 2017, Rowman & Littlefield).
Psychologist/Lyricist Robert Kastenbaum
Is that all?
I think so. Did I mention the cavalry?
The cavalry??
In the two years before I made my big move to New York, I was in a civilian troop pf horse soldiers devoted to memorializing the 1880s USA cavalryman. I rode in parades and exhibited in shows wearing an authentic cavalry uniform and brandishing the three weapons of that era: pistol, rifle, and saber. Thought I’d save that for last.
Ken as a memorial USA cavalryman