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      Dave Smith, Whose Synthesizers Shaped Electronic Music, Dies at 72

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      His innovations included the first polyphonic, programmable synthesizer and the universal connectivity of MIDI.Dave Smith, a groundbreaking synthesizer designer, died on May 31 in Detroit. He was 72.The cause was complications of a heart attack, said his wife, Denise Smith. Mr. Smith, who lived in St. Helena, Calif., had been in Detroit to attend the Movement Festival of electronic music, which ran from May 28 to 30, and died in a hospital.A statement from Mr. Smith’s company, Sequential, said, “He was on the road doing what he loved best in the company of family, friends and artists.”Mr. Smith introduced the first polyphonic and programmable synthesizer, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, in 1978. It was used on 1980s hits by Michael Jackson, the Cars, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, a-ha, Duran Duran, Genesis, the Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates. Over the next decades, instruments designed by Mr. Smith were embraced by Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Dr. Dre, Flying Lotus, Nine Inch Nails and James Blake, among many others.In the early 1980s, Mr. Smith collaborated with Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland instrument company, to create MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a shared specification that allows computers and instruments from diverse manufacturers to connect and communicate, making for countless sonic possibilities.Justin Vernon, who records as Bon Iver, wrote on Twitter, “Dave Smith made the best keyboards ever … that’s saying it lightly.”Denise Smith said in an interview: “He loved the people who used his instruments. He was very curious about how they used his instruments, how they made them sound.”David Joseph Smith was born in San Francisco on April 2, 1950, the son of Peter and Lucretia Papagni Smith. He played piano as a child and guitar and bass in rock bands, in high school and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. One of his college projects was working on a program to compose music, printing out the scores on a plotter. After graduating, he worked on what was then a new technology — microprocessors, integrated circuits on a chip — at the aerospace company Lockheed, in the area of California that would become known as Silicon Valley.He was intrigued by the synthesizer sounds on Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album, “Switched-On Bach,” he said in a 2014 interview with the Red Bull Music Academy. “It just had this life in it that was just amazing to hear.”In 1972, his interests in music and electronics converged when he bought a Minimoog, an early Moog synthesizer. He then built his own sequencer, a device to store and play patterns of notes on the Minimoog. In 1974, he started a company to build sequencers, Sequential Circuits — at first as a nights-and-weekends project, then as a full-time job, eventually as a company with 180 employees.Unlike a piano or organ, early synthesizers, like the Moog and ARP, could generate only one note at a time. Shaping a particular tone involved setting multiple knobs, switches or dials, and trying to reproduce that tone afterward meant writing down all the settings and hoping to get similar results the next time.The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and introduced in 1978, conquered both shortcomings. Controlling synthesizer functions with microprocessors, it could play five notes at once, allowing harmonies. (The company also made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet also used microprocessors to store settings in memory, providing dependable yet personalized sounds, and it was portable enough to be used onstage.Mr. Smith’s small company was swamped with orders; at times, the Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.But Mr. Smith’s innovations went much further. “Once you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you realize how easy it is to communicate digitally to another instrument with a microprocessor,” Mr. Smith explained in 2014. Other keyboard manufacturers started to incorporate microprocessors, but each company used a different, incompatible interface, a situation Mr. Smith said he considered “kind of dumb.”In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wood, a Sequential Circuits engineer, presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society convention to propose “The ‘USI’, or Universal Synthesizer Interface.” The point, he recalled in a 2014 interview with Waveshaper Media, was “Here’s an interface. It doesn’t have to be this, but we all really need to get together and do something.” Otherwise, he said, “This market’s going nowhere.”Four Japanese companies — Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai — were willing to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared standard, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked out the details of what would become MIDI. “If we had done MIDI the usual way, getting a standard made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith told the Red Bull Music Academy. “You have committees and documents and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that by just basically doing it and then throwing it out there.”In 2013, Mr. Smith told The St. Helena Star: “We made it low-cost so that it was easy for companies to integrate into their products. It was given away license free because we wanted everyone to use it.”Sequential Circuits made the first MIDI synthesizer, the Prophet-600, in 1982, and MIDI was formally announced in 1983. Nearly four decades later, the MIDI 1.0 standard is still ubiquitous, and MIDI controllers, which specify the parameters of an electronic tone, are available in everything from keyboard, wind and string instruments to cellphone apps.In 2013, 30 years after MIDI was introduced, Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi shared a Technical Grammy Award.Yamaha bought Sequential Circuits in 1987, but by then cheaper digital synthesizers had grown more popular than analog instruments like the Prophet-5, and in 1989 Yamaha shut the company down.Mr. Smith married Denise White in 1989, and they settled in St. Helena, in Northern California. In addition to her, he is survived by their daughter, Haley; their son, Campbell; and four siblings.Mr. Smith worked in synthesizer research for Yamaha and then for Korg, where he was among the designers of the Wavestation, which was used for hits by Depeche Mode and Genesis. In the 1990s, he turned to designing software synthesizers — programs creating sound directly from a computer. He was president of Seer Systems, which in 1997 introduced the first professional software synthesizer, the Windows program Reality.But Mr. Smith decided he preferred using and designing hardware, and he returned to a hands-on experience making music. As analog synthesizers gained a new following in the 21st century, he founded Dave Smith Instruments in 2002. He collaborated with Roger Linn, the inventor of the LM-1 drum machine, on a new analog drum machine, the Tempest, and with another synthesizer inventor, Tom Oberheim, on the OB-6.In 2018, after Yamaha returned the rights, he renamed his company Sequential, and in 2020, when Mr. Smith turned 70, the company introduced a revived, updated Prophet-5.“Ultimately whatever I design is something that I want to be able to play when I’m done,” Mr. Smith told Waveshaper. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” More

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      The ‘Philosopher King’ of Percussion Starts His Next Chapter

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      Steven Schick, a renowned figure in contemporary music, had nearly burned out as a performer. But a new recording project shows he’s hardly finished.SAN DIEGO — Since its first performance, in 1976, Iannis Xenakis’s “Psappha” has been at the core of the solo percussion repertory.Not that it really had competition: When it premiered, a repertory for solo percussion barely existed. But “Psappha” shook the nascent field with its tension between flexible instrumentation and rigorous beat, between stark rhythms and kaleidoscopic colors. The 14-minute piece, in which the player presides over a sprawling array, came across as a strikingly modern abstraction of an ancient ritual, teetering between sober and ecstatic.Steven Schick managed the precarious balance between those two qualities as he recorded the pounding final minute on a recent afternoon in a studio at the University of California campus here, where he has taught since 1991.“Not even my 20-year-old self could have done that,” said a smiling Schick, 68, over the control room speakers when he was done. “That was pretty good.”Renowned for the ease and lucidity with which he handles the piece’s polyphonic intensity, Schick had already recorded it for a Xenakis collection released in 2006. But this new take will become part of “Weather Systems,” a multialbum project setting down his latest thoughts on a body of work he has commanded for nearly half a century. The opening installment, “A Hard Rain,” which compiles some of the foundational pieces he learned when he was starting out as a musician, was released on Friday.The series might seem, at first glance, like a nostalgic farewell to these works. After all, as his sweat and heavy breathing when he finished the recording session made clear, percussion is, more than most instrumental music-making, a young person’s game.But after a foray into conducting — his tenure leading the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, which began as something of a lark and lasted 15 years, is ending in June — Schick is focusing anew on solo performance.“My percussion playing was saved by starting to conduct,” he said in an interview on the patio of his home in La Jolla. “The repertory is not that large. ‘Psappha’ I’ve played a thousand times. So I was really on the verge of burning out.”It was a renewal cemented during the pandemic.“I didn’t miss conducting,” he said. “And I actually didn’t really even miss teaching in person. I certainly didn’t miss playing concerts. But it was like an itch to practice. It felt like being 19 or 20: not learning these pieces because I had a concert, just doing it because I wanted to.”“Weather Systems,” then, is part textbook, part scrapbook, part lockdown diary, part communion with his younger self, part accumulation of new works. Looking to his past and sketching his future, it is intended as the magnum opus of a figure the composer Michael Gordon has called “the philosopher king of percussion music.”Schick was born in Iowa, growing up first on his family’s farm, then in a small town nearby. (“A Hard Rain” alludes to the precipitation that obsesses every farmer, as well as to the deluge of the pandemic.)“The elementary school band teacher sent home an instrument list for the parents to decide what their kids would play,” he said. “And at the top were the ones I wanted: violin, and French horn sounded kind of exotic. But down at the very bottom was drums, with an asterisk that the parents didn’t have to buy the drums, just the sticks. And my mother was frugal; I was the eldest of five.”Schick, practicing a piece by Sarah Hennies that includes a bowed vibraphone and a flour sifter, is “the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” Hennies said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSo a drummer he became, playing in marching band and some rock ’n’ roll groups. What classical music he knew was from his mother, a talented amateur pianist. She took him to see the New York Philharmonic on tour — Seiji Ozawa conducting Debussy’s “La Mer.”“And I thought, Whoa,” Schick recalled. “I just knew that wasn’t the marching band.”Planning to become a medical doctor (his father’s aspiration before farming), Schick soon transferred to the University of Iowa, where an influx of money from the Rockefeller Foundation had established an unlikely hotbed of contemporary music. When he was asked by the pianist James Avery, a faculty member, to work with him on Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” — a long, raucous electroacoustic classic created in the late 1950s — Schick was thrust into the heart of experimental music.“It was the moment there was no turning back,” he said.With a talent and work ethic that allowed him to memorize huge amounts of complex music, Schick swiftly stood out for his magnetic, theatrical performances, notable as much for the movement, almost choreographic in its fluid elegance, as for the sound.“You have to imagine the 1980s,” said Gordon, one of the trio of composers who founded the collective Bang on a Can. “People came onstage to play contemporary music with the music pasted on huge pieces of cardboard. It was: ‘I’m doing very serious work; this is very hard; this music is very complicated.’ And Steve, from the beginning, what really shocked everyone is that he decided he’s not playing anything unless he plays it by memory. And once he was freed from having to have the music, he’s an incredibly dynamic performer.”Bang on a Can brought him on as a founding member of its All-Stars chamber ensemble, a new challenge for a solo specialist. Establishing himself in San Diego, where he turned his class of graduate students into the touring ensemble Red Fish Blue Fish, he continued to be the rare artist equally interested in the complex tangles of Brian Ferneyhough and Charles Wuorinen; the open-ended spareness of Morton Feldman and John Cage; and the Post-Minimalist rock inflections of Gordon and his cohort.All these styles come together in “The Percussionist’s Art,” his 2006 book that is a kind of memoir in music: poetic and thoughtful, but without stinting on detailed measure-by-measure advice for his fellow performers.“He wrote about these pieces in the same way I would hear pianists talk about the classic pieces in their repertoire,” said Ian Rosenbaum, a member of the quartet Sandbox Percussion. “He wasn’t talking about them in terms of sticks and the technical things; he was talking about them in terms of feelings and emotions. It was a dimension of interpretation that I had never really considered before.”Schick on the beach near his home in La Jolla, Calif. “It turns out I’m a better player than I was,” he said.John Francis Peters for The New York TimesSchick developed a reputation as a player whose technique could handle any obstacle. “Any reasonable composer would think: This is Steve Schick; he can play anything; I’m just going to write a virtuoso showpiece, and every impossible thing I can think of,” said John Luther Adams, a close friend and collaborator, who wrote the suite “The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies” for Schick in 2002.“I did exactly the opposite,” Adams went on. “I gave him this piece which requires a kind of Butoh virtuosity, this nearly frozen slow-motion virtuosity.”Schick, of course, took it in stride and made it his own, as he does with almost every musical dare. Lacking enough hands for an old Bang on a Can piece, he figured out that he could attach sleigh bells to his ankles and dance the part.He has filmed performances without audience in the Arctic tundra and in misty Canadian mountains, and, four years ago, led the San Diego Symphony in a stirring interpretation of Adams’s “Inuksuit” at the U.S.-Mexico border, with musicians on both sides. He will play in Tyshawn Sorey’s epic, glacial “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” this fall at the Park Avenue Armory, having participated in the premiere at the Rothko Chapel in Houston in February.“Weather Systems” is being released on the Islandia Music Records label, founded by the cellist Maya Beiser, another close friend and a fellow founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. “I knew I wanted to do a big project with Steve,” she said. “It worked out perfectly that he was in this moment in his career when he wanted to refocus on his solo work.”A collaboration with the audio engineer Andrew Munsey, “A Hard Rain” is a meditative two hours of music, with the dark resonance of a cave — and, in Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate,” a flood of Dada babble. Next up will be an installment of radio-play-type pieces for speaking percussionist by George Lewis, Vivian Fung, Pamela Z and Roger Reynolds.And, further in the future, an album including “Psappha.” Schick’s new recording recreates the situation of his practice studio on campus during the pandemic, when limited space meant that hanging gongs surrounded his setup for the Xenakis. The result is a barely audible but palpable shimmer around the beats that bleeds into the pauses — a subtle heightening of the ritualistic nature of the piece, and an indelible record of Schick’s life over the past couple of years.“Steve is really the god of a certain kind of percussion playing,” said Sarah Hennies, a player and composer who studied with him in San Diego. “The music of ‘Psappha’ is ecstatic and transporting and powerful. But the way Steve plays it, it doesn’t feel like he’s showing off, which is what a lot of people want to do.”And Schick has grown only more economical in his gestures, the distribution of his energy.“All these percussion solos from that period of time were written for young, acrobatic people,” he said of the “Hard Rain” collection. “So the question is, what does an aging body, but a more experienced body, have to offer? And it turns out I’m a better player than I was. I don’t waste any time.” More

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      Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Master of the Santoor, Dies at 84

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      He single-handedly elevated a 100-string instrument little known outside Kashmir into a prominent component of Hindustani classical music.Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, an Indian musician and composer who was the foremost exponent of the santoor, a 100-string instrument similar to the hammered dulcimer, died on Tuesday at his home in Mumbai. He was 84.Indian news reports said the cause was cardiac arrest.Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Mr. Sharma became the first musician to propel the santoor onto the world stage, at concerts and recitals in India and elsewhere.Before Mr. Sharma started playing the santoor, it was little known outside Kashmir. Even there it was used only to play Sufiana Mausiqi, a genre of Kashmiri classical music with Persian, Central Asian and Indian roots.The santoor, a trapezoidal wooden instrument whose strings stretch over 25 wooden bridges, is played with slim wooden mallets. On the santoor, in contrast with the sitar, sarod or sarangi, the string instruments traditionally used in Hindustani classical music, it is difficult to sustain notes and perform the meends, or glides from one note to another, essential to the Hindustani musical tradition.That might be one reason it took Mr. Sharma so many years to be recognized for his artistry.At the beginning of his career, purists and critics derided the santoor’s staccato sound, and many urged Mr. Sharma to switch to another instrument. Instead he spent years redesigning the santoor to enable it to play more notes per octave, making it more suitable for the complex ragas, the melodic framework of Hindustani music.“My story is different from that of other classical musicians,” Mr. Sharma told The Times of India in 2002. “While they had to prove their mettle, their talent, their caliber, I had to prove the worth of my instrument. I had to fight for it.”He released several albums, beginning with “Call of the Valley” (1967), a collaboration with the acclaimed flutist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and the guitarist Brij Bhushan Kabra.Mr. Chaurasia and Mr. Sharma were close friends and frequent collaborators. Together they composed music for several successful Bollywood films in the 1980s and ’90s including “Silsila” (1981), “Chandni” (1989), “Lamhe” (1991) and “Darr” (1993). Mr. Sharma was one of the few Indian musicians who straddled the worlds of classical and popular music.In 1974, Mr. Sharma performed across North America with the sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar as part of the former Beatle George Harrison’s 45-show “Dark Horse” concert tour, bringing Indian classical music to audiences beyond South Asia alongside some of the finest classical musicians from India — Alla Rakha on tabla, Sultan Khan on sarangi, L. Subramaniam on violin, T.V. Gopalakrishnan on mridangam and vocals, Mr. Chaurasia on flute, Gopal Krishan on vichitra veena and Lakshmi Shankar on vocals.Mr. Sharma, center, in red, in 2018 in Mumbai. He was awarded some of India’s highest honors for his contributions to Indian culture.Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesMr. Sharma was awarded some of India’s highest honors, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1986, the Padma Shri in 1991 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001.Shiv Kumar (sometimes rendered Shivkumar) Sharma was born on Jan. 13, 1938, in Jammu, India, to Pandit Uma Devi Sharma, a classical musician who belonged to the family of royal priests of the maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, and Kesar Devi. He began singing and tabla lessons in with his father at the age of 5, showing great promise. In “Journey With a Hundred Strings” (2002), a biography of Mr. Sharma, Ina Puri wrote that he would spend hours immersed in music, practicing various instruments.“There was an obsessive element in my attitude to music even then,” she quoted him as saying. “It was the air I breathed, the reason I lived.”By age 12 he was an accomplished tabla player, regularly performing on Radio Jammu and accompanying leading musicians who visited the city. When he was 14, his father returned from Srinagar, where he had been working, with a present: a santoor. Mr. Sharma was not happy about learning a new, unfamiliar instrument. But his father was adamant. “Mark my words, son,” he recalled his father saying. “Shiv Kumar Sharma and the santoor will become synonymous in years to come. Have the courage to start something from scratch. You will be recognized as a pioneer.”In 1955, Mr. Sharma gave his first major public performance on the santoor, at the Haridas Sangeet Sammelan festival in Bombay (now Mumbai). The youngest participant at 17, he persuaded the organizers to allow him to play both the santoor and the tabla. He was reluctantly given 30 minutes to play the instrument of his choice, but on the day of the recital he played the santoor for a full hour — to rapturous applause. The organizers called him back for another recital the next day.He soon received offers to play and act in Hindi films, but after one film, the 1955 hit “Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje,” he was determined to focus on classical music. He performed around the country in an effort to establish the santoor as a classical instrument.He moved to Bombay at 22; to make ends meet, he played the santoor on sessions for dozens of popular Hindi film songs while continuing to build his classical reputation.He is survived by his wife, Manorama; his sons, Rahul, a well-known santoor player and composer, and Rohit; and two grandchildren.After Mr. Sharma’s death, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among those paying tribute. “Our cultural world is poorer with the demise of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma Ji,” he wrote on Twitter. “He popularized the santoor at a global level. His music will continue to enthrall the coming generations.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Horn

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      Listen to music that shows off the golden, mellow sunshine of “the cello of the brass section.”In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos, music for dance, Wagner and Renaissance music.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the golden, mellow sunshine of the horn. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Sarah Willis, Berlin Philharmonic hornistThe French horn is so versatile. Heroic, romantic, scary, mysterious — you name it, the horn can play that part. And it’s a sociable instrument: We love to play together. In the third movement of Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 2, the horn is a virtuosic and passionate hero, which the horns in the orchestra join at the end of the movement for a final fanfare. These last moments always lift my heart and make me proud to be a horn player.Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 2Norbert Hauptmann, horn; Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Akshaya Avril Tucker, composerGive me a long, quiet note on the horn and I feel like I’ve entered a place of timelessness. It’s an incredibly soothing, supportive sound — the best sonic cuddle buddy. In orchestration classes, I’ve heard the horn referred to as “glue”; it cushions and supports its neighbors in the orchestra like no other instrument. Jonathan Dove’s “Susanna in the Rain,” from his “Figures in the Garden,” is utter comfort. A small ensemble of woodwinds provides a gentle pitter-patter of rain, while the horn — first one, then two — soars above. When I listen on the drought-stricken West Coast to these yearning melodies, they sound like a nourishing downpour.Dove’s “Susanna in the Rain”Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Antony Pay, conductor (Warner)◆ ◆ ◆Paquito D’Rivera, saxophonist and composerThe French horn — a rather exotic instrument in the history of jazz — has among its most creative practitioners Willie Ruff, John Graas, David Amram, Gunther Schuller, John Clark and Chris Komer; I just composed a piece for Komer and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. But we always have to mention Julius Watkins, considered by many the father of the modern jazz French horn, and a good example of his masterful work — transcribed by the Brazilian hornist-composer Victor Prado — is this interesting improvised solo on “Phantom’s Blues,” recorded with the Quincy Jones Orchestra in 1960.“Phantom’s Blues”Julius Watkins, horn; Quincy Jones Orchestra◆ ◆ ◆Franz Welser-Möst, Cleveland Orchestra conductorThe horn has this beautiful, warm, singing sound, which resembles the middle register of the human voice; that is why it is so easy to connect to. The horn is sort of the cello of the brass section. The violins, trumpet and flute are in a high register, and not many people can sing that high, while the register in which the horn plays is accessible to anybody.I chose the opening of the third movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, simply because people usually think of the horn as a hunting instrument. The horn here represents the crying out of the human soul, sort of lost in the ocean of an overwhelming world. In this section, the horn is an individual human voice surrounded by a crazy, dancing universe of other instruments. Mahler was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, so his music is always about the psyche — of an individual and of humanity.Mahler’s Fifth SymphonyVienna Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music criticBrahms’s mother died early in 1865; later that year, he wrote a trio for violin, piano and horn, an instrument he had learned as a child. The result — for which he specified the affably rustic, if difficult to control, valveless horn, rather than the newer valved variety — is by turns serene, agitated, mournful and joyful, with the horn throughout evoking walks in nature and an ineffable nostalgia.Brahms’s Horn TrioMyron Bloom, horn; Rudolf Serkin, piano; Michael Tree, violin (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerThe horn, with its mellow colors, doesn’t always conjure pure relaxation; it can be regal even in passages of tranquillity. The composer William Bolcom uses this simultaneously lyrical and potent quality during stretches of his Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano, created in response to Brahms’s famous trio. But in the final movement — which he has described as a “resolute march of resistance,” written in the wake of the 2016 election — Bolcom lets the instrument strut, with some raucous pressurized notes, drawing it closer to its more jazz-associated cousins in the brass section.Bolcom’s Horn TrioSteven Gross, horn; Philip Ficsor; violin; Constantine Finehouse, piano (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Kevin Newton, Imani Winds hornist“Ecos oníricos de la Basílica de San Marcos” was written for me by the Argentine composer José Manuel Serrano. The piece, for a soloist and prerecorded horns, transforms the sound of the horn into ghostly echoes in a cathedral, requiring the player to access a wide range of textures and microtones.For me, the horn has always been an extension of the voice. My childhood was filled with many a long car ride in which my mother would teach me to sing harmony, as well as choir rehearsals and weekend mornings at the piano working out hymns or whatever else of her songbooks I could get my hands on. When I first heard the horn, I wished that my voice could produce those sounds, and a love for the instrument was born. Its flexibility has freed me from the limitations of my own voice, and this piece is a wonderful space to explore that freedom.Serrano’s “Ecos oníricos de la Basílica de San Marcos”Kevin Newton◆ ◆ ◆Mei-Ann Chen, Chicago Sinfonietta conductorI knew Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s granddaughter, Katy Korngold Hubbard, before I knew his music. Once, driving in the rain, I had to pull over to the side of the road because I was so incredibly moved by the sublime music on the radio. I didn’t know the composer. The last movement of the mystery work — it turned out to be Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” Suite — was so joyful and witty, featuring the horns prominently, that I was transported to a different world. I became a huge Korngold fan. This rarely performed work should be better known.Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” SuiteOrchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg; Marc Albrecht, conductor (Pentatone)◆ ◆ ◆Bernard Labadie, Orchestra of St. Luke’s conductorDeep in the German psyche, the horn is closely associated with the forest — not only in relation to hunting but also to the romantic idea of night, moonlight and starry skies. No piece of music epitomizes this connection like Schubert’s “Nachtgesang im Walde” (“Nighttime Song in the Forest”), written for a four-part men’s choir and four horns. This highly unusual formation explains why this little masterpiece is a rare guest on concert stages. And yet what fabulous music this is, with Schubert’s unmistakable mixture of harmonic magic and deep connection with text. Never has the sound of the horn felt so simultaneously grounded and ethereal.Schubert’s “Nachtgesang im Walde”Monteverdi Choir; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor (Philips)◆ ◆ ◆Mark Almond, San Francisco Symphony hornistConductors and fellow musicians never seem to mind how loudly you can blow the horn, but they really, really care about how softly you can play; in fact, your career depends on it. As the natural harmonics of the instrument are very close together in the high register, playing pianissimo in that range requires laser focus and surgical precision. Next time you’re at the symphony, imagine the hornists as darts players, having to throw bull’s-eyes every 20 seconds for 45 minutes. Then imagine the conductor standing next to the dart board, silently urging the player to throw each dart as gently as possible, but still demanding that the bull’s-eye be hit every time.The flip side: It’s incredibly liberating to play pieces in which you can just let it rip and go for it, as loudly as (tastefully) possible, like in this exciting recording of Haydn’s “Hornsignal” Symphony, performed by the natural horn players — no valves! — of the Concentus Musicus Wien.Haydn’s “Hornsignal” SymphonyConcentus Musicus Wien; Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor (Warner)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerDeep into Strauss’s last opera, “Capriccio,” comes one of the most magical moments that ever flowed from his pen. A countess has to choose between the love of a poet and a composer — between the primacy of words and music. She never quite makes a selection, but before the final scene, in which she wrestles with her fate, Strauss makes his own feelings clear. As evening falls and the moon lights the scene, a horn glows in the dusk.It’s a profoundly moving interlude, and this is a profoundly moving account, a tribute from one horn player of distinction, Alan Civil, to a colleague who was arguably the greatest of them all: Dennis Brain, the principal horn of the Philharmonia Orchestra, who was killed in a car crash in 1957, two days before the sessions for this first recording of the work.Strauss’s “Capriccio”Philharmonia Orchestra; Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor (Warner)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Klaus Schulze, Pioneering Electronic Composer, Is Dead at 74

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      In a prolific career spanning five decades, he helped pave the way for ambient, techno and trance music.Klaus Schulze, a German electronic musician whose hypnotic, pulsating, swirling compositions filled five decades of solo albums, collaborations and film scores, died on Tuesday. He was 74.His Facebook page announced the death. The announcement said he died “after a long illness” but did not provide any details.Mr. Schulze played drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. But he largely abandoned them in the early 1970s and turned to working with electric organs, tape recorders and echo effects, and later with early analog synthesizers. His music thrived on every technological advance.He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.While he announced his retirement from performing in 2010, he continued to compose and record. A new album, “Deus Arrakis,” is due in June.Mr. Schulze’s music encompassed the psychedelic jams of early krautrock, orchestral works, song-length tracks with vocals, an electronic opera and brief soundtrack cues. Much of his music was extended and richly consonant, using drones, loops and echoes in ways that forecast — and then joined and expanded on — both immersive ambient music and beat-driven techno and trance music.He was habitually reluctant to describe or analyze the ideas or techniques of his music. “I am a musician, not a speaker,” he said in a 1998 interview. “What music only can do on its own is just one thing: to show emotions. Just emotions. Sadness, joy, silence, excitement, tension.”Klaus Schulze was born on Aug. 4, 1947, in Berlin. His mother was a ballet dancer, his father a writer.He played guitar and bass in bands as a teenager, and he studied literature, philosophy and modern classical composition at the University of Berlin. Drawn to the avant-garde scene around the Berlin nightclub Zodiac, he played drums in a psychedelic rock trio, Psy Free.He became Tangerine Dream’s drummer in 1969 and performed on the group’s debut album, “Electronic Meditation,” a collection of free-form improvisations released in 1970. He was also experimenting with recordings of his latest instrument, an electric organ. But Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream’s guitarist and leader, didn’t want to use Mr. Schulze’s organ tapes onstage and told him, “You either play drums or you leave,” Mr. Schulze said in a 2015 interview.Mr. Schulze left. He formed a new space-rock trio, Ash Ra Tempel, and played drums on the band’s 1971 debut album before starting his solo career. Instead of drumming, he recalled, “I wanted to play with harmonies and sounds.”He didn’t yet own a synthesizer in 1972 when he made his first solo album, “Irrlicht” (“Will-o’-the-Wisp”). Its three drone-centered, slowly evolving tracks were made with his electric organ and guitar and with manipulated cassette recordings of a student orchestra.Mr. Schulze began playing solo concerts in 1973 and amassed a growing collection of synthesizers. “By nature I am an ‘explorer’ type of musician,” he told Sound and Vision magazine in 2018. “When electronic musical instruments became available, the search was over. I had found the tool I had been looking for: endless opportunities, unlimited sound possibilities, and rhythm and melody at my complete disposal.”Mr. Schulze’s 1975 album “Timewind,” dedicated to Richard Wagner, is widely regarded as his early pinnacle.Made in Germany MusicUsing drum machines and sequencers, Mr. Schulze introduced propulsive electronic rhythms to his music. His vertiginous album “Timewind” (1975) is widely regarded as his early pinnacle. In France, it won the Grand Prix du Disque International award, boosting his record sales with compulsory orders from libraries across the country. He moved to Hambühren, Germany, and built the studio where he would record most of his music over the next decades.“Timewind” was dedicated to Richard Wagner; its two tracks were titled “Bayreuth Return,” named after the town where Wagner’s operas are presented in an annual festival, and “Wahnfried 1883,” named after Wagner’s villa there. Mr. Schulze would later record a series of albums under the names Richard Wahnfried and then Wahnfriet. “The way Wagner’s music introduced me to the use of dynamics, subtlety, drama, and the possible magnitudes of music in general remains unparalleled to me,” he said in 2018.Another acknowledged influence was Pink Floyd. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Schulze and the German producer and composer Pete Namlook collaborated on “The Dark Side of the Moog,” a series of 11 albums drawing on Pink Floyd motifs.In the mid-1970s, Mr. Schulze visited Japan to produce and mix the Far East Family Band, whose members included the electronic musician who would later go solo and achieve fame as Kitaro. He also recorded and performed with Stomu Yamashta’s Go, a group that included the English multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Steve Winwood, the American guitarist Al Di Meola and the American drummer Michael Shrieve. And he continued to pump out solo projects, including the soundtrack for a pornographic film, “Body Love” (1977).He collaborated through the years with Ash Ra Tempel’s guitarist, Manuel Göttsching. In 2000 Mr. Schulze and Mr. Göttsching revived the name Ash Ra Tempel for a duo album, “Friendship,” and a concert recorded as “Gin Rosé at the Royal Festival Hall.”Mr. Schulze toured Europe extensively from the 1970s until 2010, though he did not tour the United States. In 1991, he performed for 10,000 people outside Cologne Cathedral.In 1979, the German division of Warner Bros. Records gave him his own imprint, Innovative Communication, which had one major hit with Ideal, a Berlin band. He started his own label for electronic music, Inteam, in 1984. But he abandoned it three years later after realizing that it was losing money on every act’s recordings except his.Mr. Schulze in concert in Berlin in 2009. He gave up performing the next year but continued to compose and record. Jakubaszek/Getty ImagesMr. Schulze announced his switch from analog to digital synthesizers with the 1979 album “Dig It.” As sampling technology improved in the 1980s and ’90s, he incorporated samples of voices, instruments and nature sounds into his music. In the 2000s, as faster computers fostered more complex sound processing, he turned to software synthesizers.In 1994, he released “Totentag” (“Day of the Dead”), an electronic opera; in 2008, he began recording and touring with Lisa Gerrard, the singer and lyricist of the band Dead Can Dance. By the 2010s, he was mixing his new compositions in surround sound.Mr. Schulze is survived by his wife, Elfi Schulze; his sons, Maximilian and Richard; and four grandchildren.Through his copious projects, Mr. Schulze’s music maintained a sense of timing: when to meditate, when to build, when to ease back, when to leap ahead, how to balance suspense and repose, dissonance and consonance.“I prefer beauty, I always did,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “Of course, I also use brutal or unpleasant sounds sometimes, but only to show the variety. Beauty is more beautiful to a listener if I also show him the ugliness that does exist. I use it as part of the drama of a composition. But I’m not interested in music that shows only ugliness.“Also,” he added, “I believe that ugliness in music is more easy to achieve than — excuse the expression — ‘real music.’” More

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      William Kraft, Percussionist and Force in New Music, Dies at 98

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      A mainstay of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he also composed music that elevated overlooked instruments like the timpani.Lamenting the abundance of what he called “rat-a-tat, boom-boom” music for drums, William Kraft set out to create more sophisticated offerings that would bring greater respect to instruments he felt were too often taken for granted in orchestras.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” he wrote in 1968. “The last of orchestral families to be exploited, they have come of age in the 20th century.”Mr. Kraft, who as both a composer and a percussionist became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism, died on Feb. 12 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. He was 98.His wife, the composer Joan Huang, said the cause was heart failure.A spirited performer, Mr. Kraft was acclaimed for his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent 26 years, 18 of them as principal timpanist.But he was perhaps best known as a composer. A frequent collaborator with Igor Stravinsky, Mr. Kraft helped lend legitimacy to contemporary music in the United States, founding ensembles to showcase modern composers at a time when many classical musicians were skeptical of straying too far from the traditional canon.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Mr. Kraft wrote.Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPlaying his music — deliberate yet freewheeling, flashy but spiritual — became a rite of passage for percussionists, and his works were heard in band rooms and concert halls alike.William Kraft was born in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1923, the son of Louis and Florence (Rogalsky) Kashareftsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. (His father changed the family name from Kashareftsky to Kraft upon arriving in the United States.) When William was 3, the family moved to San Diego, where his parents opened a delicatessen and, at his mother’s urging, he began studying piano.While he adored the music of French Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel (“my great idols,” friends say he called them), he did not initially anticipate making composition a career.“I just thought they were gods and not to be touched,” he said in a 2020 interview with Ching Juhl, a producer and violist. “They were influences, but I never thought I could write the style.”During World War II, when he worked as a drummer and pianist in American military bands stationed in Europe, he began exploring composition more seriously.His roommate at the time, a trumpet player, asked him to produce an arrangement of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Mr. Kraft agreed, but he wanted to do it his way, composing an elaborate introduction based on the musical interval of the fourth.Mr. Kraft earned a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic the next year and rose through the ranks, becoming principal timpanist in 1963. On the side, he continued writing his own works, including percussion pieces in the style of Baroque suites and a series of compositions that he called “Encounters,” pairing percussion with a variety of other instruments, including trumpet and harp. He called himself an “American Impressionist.”Mr. Kraft, center, in Los Angeles in 2008 after a concert by the ensemble Southwest Chamber Music honoring him on his 85th birthday. He was joined by the ensemble’s John Schneider, left, and Ricardo Gallardo.Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesZubin Mehta, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1962 to 1978, described Mr. Kraft as a nimble musician. He recalled Mr. Kraft rearranging the timpani part for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for one player, rather than two as was standard, making it easier for the Philharmonic to perform while on tour.“He knew the pieces so well,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “It just came naturally.”Mr. Mehta elevated Mr. Kraft to the post of assistant conductor, which he held from 1969 to 1972. Mr. Kraft sold his instruments and retired from playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1981 to become the orchestra’s composer in residence.Stravinsky, who moved to California in the 1940s, had a significant influence on Mr. Kraft. (Mr. Kraft once said hearing “The Rite of Spring” for the first time as a teenager “changed my life.”) The two men worked together often. Mr. Kraft played timpani in Stravinsky’s ensembles and helped edit the percussion parts for Stravinsky’s musical play “The Soldier’s Tale.”Mr. Kraft’s music, with its emphasis on rhythmic freedom, often seemed to pay homage to Stravinsky. Mr. Kraft was also fond of virtuosic feats; one of his concertos demands the performer play 15 timpani.“He was one of the few atonal composers who really somehow wrote very uplifting music,” said the composer Paul Polivnick, a friend. “While he had his mathematical formulas, he let his music be based in creating a sense of emotional and dramatic power.”In 1956 he organized the First Percussion Quartet, made up of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The ensemble, which later grew in size and changed its name to the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Players, promoted works by composers including Stravinsky, Alberto Ginastera and Edgard Varèse.In 1981, Mr. Kraft founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He also had a busy teaching career, serving as chairman of the composition department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1991 to 2002.“He put Los Angeles on the map as a hot spot for contemporary music,” said Joseph Pereira, the current principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We are still reaping the benefits of Kraft’s impact on the Philharmonic, and on the new music community.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Kraft is survived by a son, Patrick; a daughter, Jennifer; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.He composed until the end of his life, sitting at the piano each day to sketch out ideas. At his death he was working on a piece called “Kaleidoscope” as well as a rearrangement of a piano concerto.The day before he died, Ms. Huang said, Mr. Kraft asked about his unfinished pieces, and she promised to complete them.“He just loved composing,” she said. “It was his language.” More

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      Dale Clevenger, Chicago Symphony’s Fearless Horn Master, Dies at 81

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      Mr. Clevenger, who played his notoriously treacherous instrument with daring, was an anchor of the Chicago orchestra’s famed brass section for 47 years.Dale Clevenger, whose expressive, daring playing as the solo French horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 47 years made him one of the most respected orchestral instrumentalists of his generation, died on Jan. 5 at a hospital near his home in Brescia, Italy. He was 81.The cause was complications of Waldenstrom’s disease, a form of lymphoma, his family said.Mr. Clevenger was a pillar of the famed Chicago brass section, which has long been renowned as an unrivaled force for its clean, majestic sound, fearless attacks and sheer might. Working with his equally enduring fellow principals, Adolph Herseth on trumpet, Jay Friedman on trombone and Arnold Jacobs on tuba, Mr. Clevenger helped shape that section into the envy of the orchestra world, and the joy of its conductors.In a statement, Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s music director, called him “one of the best and most famous horn players of our time and one of the glories of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”Mr. Clevenger’s willingness to take risks on his notoriously treacherous instrument, and his ability to surmount those risks seemingly with ease, were symbols of the brash quality of his orchestra. He was a technical virtuoso, but he was also capable of producing an enormous range of colors on his instrument, Mr. Muti’s predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, said. He was also a frequent chamber music partner and soloist.The Chicago ensemble was already full of idols when Mr. Clevenger joined in 1966, but Mr. Herseth and Mr. Jacobs were inspirations for him, both for their excellence and for their longevity.When the Boston Symphony offered Mr. Clevenger a post in the mid-1970s, he asked his mentors if they intended to perform in Chicago for as long as they physically could. They said yes. He resolved, he later recalled, that “as long as they were in the orchestra, there is nothing that would lure me away from Chicago.” Mr. Herseth went on to be principal for 53 years, Mr. Jacobs for 44.Mr. Clevenger was, however, a more versatile musician than that might imply. For 17 years he had a regular Tuesday-night date playing jazz with a group called Ears, which he said made him a stronger orchestral player. “Within the confines of symphonic structure,” he said in 1978 about the lessons he learned from improvising, “I can make music in a more relaxed, freer way.”Jazz was a side gig, but Mr. Clevenger was serious about leaving his seat on the stage to stand on the podium. “My dream is eventually to become a respected conductor of a major orchestra anywhere in the world,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986. That was not to be, but he did direct the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble in the Chicago suburbs, from 1981 to 1995.The Chicago Symphony’s horn section in the late 1970s. From left, Frank Brouk, Richard Oldberg, Norman Schweikert, Mr. Clevenger and Daniel Gingrich. Robert M. Lightfoot II/Chicago Symphony Orchestra Michael Dale Clevenger was born on July 2, 1940, in Chattanooga, Tenn., the third of four children of Ernest Clevenger, a sawmill manufacturer who was briefly the president of the Chattanooga Opera Association, and Mary Ellen (Fridell) Clevenger, a homemaker. He started learning piano at age 7 and went to concerts with his father.“I kept my eye on this shape of metal, which was the French horn,” Mr. Clevenger recalled of attending those concerts in a video interview for Abilene Christian University in 1984. “I was infatuated with the way they looked. The more I looked, the more I became infatuated with the way they sound. I had a dream, a vision, to play one of those things.”Unable to afford a horn, Ernest Clevenger bought his 11-year-old son a trumpet instead, but Dale persisted. At 14, after making do with a school instrument for a year, he had his own horn, and his life.Mr. Clevenger performed in the Chattanooga Symphony and the Chattanooga High School band, under the bandmaster A.R. Casavant, who played him records of the Chicago Symphony during his lunch hour.He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1958 to study with Forrest Standley, the principal of the Pittsburgh Symphony.After graduating in 1962, he freelanced in New York, joined Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra and spent a year as principal of the Kansas City Philharmonic.He failed his first audition with the Chicago Symphony, in May 1965, but succeeded at a second, in January 1966. On his first week on the job, he was a soloist in Frank Martin’s Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion and String Orchestra.“For his initial time out,” The Chicago Tribune reported, “he seems a capable addition to our superb first chair lineup.”The Martin concerto was recorded and later released. As well as appearing countless times on record as an ensemble player, Mr. Clevenger was a soloist on several later Chicago Symphony recordings, including a glowing account of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings under Carlo Maria Giulini and a disc of Strauss concertos that won a Grammy in 2002. Mr. Clevenger also set down Haydn and Mozart concertos with the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, and earned a further Grammy for the quintets for piano and winds by Beethoven and Mozart, sharing the bill with the Chicago principal clarinet Larry Combs (a fellow jazz player on Tuesday nights), two members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Mr. Barenboim.The composer John Williams wrote a concerto for Mr. Clevenger. Mr. Williams conducted its premiere with the Chicago Symphony and Mr. Clevenger in 2003. Todd Rosenberg /Chicago Symphony Orchestra In his final years in Chicago, music critics began raising questions about whether Mr. Clevenger was performing up to his usual standards. In 2010 Andrew Patner, writing in The Chicago Sun-Times, called for him to place “a cap on a unique orchestral career that should be noted for its many triumphs and not a late struggle against time.”Mr. Clevenger retired from the orchestra in 2013 and joined the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He had also taught at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities.Mr. Clevenger married Nancy Sutherland in 1966; they divorced in 1987. Alice Render, a hornist and sometime section partner in the Chicago Symphony, became his wife that year; she died in 2011. He married Giovanna Grassi in 2012. She survives him, as do a son, Michael, and a daughter, Ami, from his first marriage; two sons, Mac and Jesse, from his second marriage; a sister, Alice Clevenger Cooper; and two grandchildren.Mr. Clevenger, for whom John Williams wrote a concerto in 2003, always maintained that the purpose of his playing was to delight.“I realize that I have been given a gift, by God, to make music, to perform music, and to give people joy,” he said in the 1984 video interview. “I have the pleasure, the privilege, of making people happy — and in doing so, making my own self happy.” More

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      Judith Davidoff, Master of Long-Dormant Instruments, Dies at 94

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      A master of the viola da gamba and other stringed instruments, she was a central part of the early-music scene.Judith Davidoff, who mastered an assortment of stringed instruments not widely played for centuries, especially the cello-like viola da gamba, and became a leading proponent and player of early music, died on Dec. 19 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.Her children, Max Rosen and Rebekah Rosen-Gomez, confirmed the death.Ms. Davidoff was trained as a cellist, and she was a good one.“She was an absolutely amazing sight reader,” Lisa Terry, a fellow musician who learned from her, said in a phone interview. That skill had Ms. Davidoff in demand for recording sessions.But while she was studying the cello as a teenager, something caught Ms. Davidoff’s eye.“Inevitably as I got involved in the repertoire, I began to notice music for an instrument called the viola da gamba,” she told The Intelligencer Journal of Lancaster, Pa., in 1983. “I got curious as a teenager to know what this instrument was.”That instrument was a bowed and fretted fiddle, held mostly between the legs, that first became popular in the late 15th century and flourished throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods.Curiosity led to a passion for early music and the instruments used to perform it. First in Boston, then in New York, Ms. Davidoff became part of an early-music scene that was gaining momentum in the middle of the last century and became a major force in classical music, even influencing how works from later periods were performed.Over the years she was a member of numerous ensembles, including the Boston Camerata, the Cambridge Consort and New York Pro Musica. She was a founding member of the group Music for a While and, in 1972, created the New York Consort of Viols. She also played vintage instruments on numerous recordings.She liked to devise programs that, in addition to showcasing the music, had an educational element. One program she created with the Consort of Viols, for instance, was called “The Road From Valencia” and featured Renaissance works by Jewish composers and viol players who, having been expelled from Spain in 1492, made their way to Italy and, in some cases, to the court of Henry VIII in England.Her knowledge of instruments of yore was vast. With a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” she once worked up an educational program she called “The 39 Strings” featuring seven vertically held bowed instruments that had come into and out of fashion — the rebec, the vielle, the two-stringed Chinese erhu, medieval fiddles and more. Collectively, the seven instruments had 39 strings and represented eight centuries of music.“Our musical experiences have been enhanced by each successive period and style,” she told The Northern Valley Suburbanite when she presented the program in Englewood, N.J., in 2002.Judith Davidoff — she continued to perform under her own name after her marriage to Sumner Rosen in 1949 — was born on Oct. 21, 1927, in Chelsea, Mass. Her father, Sidney, was a composer and musician, and her mother, Ruth (Feinstein) Davidoff, was a teacher.Judith started her musical studies at 7, and at 18 she performed as a cello soloist with the Boston Pops. She studied at Radcliffe College and the Longy School of Music, earning a soloist diploma.A few years after she first became curious about the viola da gamba, she heard the early music group the Boston Camerata and spoke to some of its members after the concert, expressing her interest in learning the instrument. One member was leaving the group and offered to sell Ms. Davidoff her instrument; another offered to teach it to her; a third told her she could probably join the group once she mastered it.“I had the instrument and the incentive all at the same time,” she said in the 1983 interview.While living in the Boston area she was able to practice and perform on the period instruments in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1964 she relocated to New York, in part to play with Pro Musica.Ms. Davidoff in an undated photo. She sought to dispel the mystery behind instruments from before the Classical era in programs that were often educational.via Max RosenThe curiosity that first led Ms. Davidoff to early music stayed with her for her entire career. In 1971, for example, when she was already established as an early-music performer, she took a course in how to dance the court dances of the Baroque era. Learning the steps gave her new insights into how the accompanying music should be performed.“This course has revolutionized the feeling of the whole music of this period for me,” she told The New York Times.She was also always on the lookout for new discoveries.“She toured all over the world looking for instruments to play,” Ms. Terry, a past president of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, said. In addition to teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and other institutions, Ms. Davidoff served residencies in Turkey, where she learned a stringed instrument called the kemence, and Taiwan, where she learned the erhu.Though the instruments she played may have been from earlier eras, she believed new works could and should still be created for them.“One powerful impact Judith had was her fierce devotion to getting living composers to write for the viola da gamba,” Ms. Terry said. In her late 60s, Ms. Davidoff earned a Ph.D. at the Union Institute (now the Union Institute & University), based in Cincinnati. Her dissertation, “The Waning and Waxing of the Viol,” included both an in-depth history of the instrument and a catalog of music written for it in the 20th century.Ms. Davidoff’s husband, a political economist noted for his work on social issues, died in 2005. In addition to her children, she is survived by a sister, Edith Muskat; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson.Ms. Davidoff knew that some people might need a little help learning to appreciate the music she liked to perform.“The process of courting the audience is a tricky one,” she wrote in her dissertation. “Listeners, except for the ardent early-music groupies, often feel insecure about their lack of preparation, and the right tone must be found — the mystery of the unknown must be broken without doing the music an injustice or patronizing the patron.” More