My Elegy for Strings (1952) was first performed in Belho Horizonte, Brazil, conducted by my composition teacher, Guido Santórsola. I did not hear that performance, but I was present when he conducted it in Montevideo a few weeks later. To this day I recall a local critic writing that he enjoyed this dark, brooding piece, but that it had to be impersonal, because it seemed inconceivable to him that a fourteen-year-old boy living in Montevideo could write such sad, dark music. The Elegy was a first in many ways for my beginnings as a composer. It was my first published composition (by the Pan American Union in Washington DC, which in turn led to my life-long relationship with Peer Music publishers). It was my first work to be played abroad, with performances at Radio France in Paris, conducted by Juan Protasi, and a New York première at Carnegie Hall conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Shortly after my arrival in the United States I started my studies with Aaron Copland, and it was he who suggested the title for the enigmatic Momento psicológico (1957). I had mentioned to Copland the motive behind this work: “There is that crucial moment in life when you must decide whether to make a left or a right turn, and that choice can shape your destiny.” Copland replied: “It’s a fateful, psychological Moment.”

After graduation from the University of Minnesota, and Antal Dorati’s departure from Minneapolis, with my Guggenheim grants finished, life became a big question mark. While driving back to New York I stopped for gas in a small city in upstate New York, and read a newspaper announcement that on that same evening the local orchestra was auditioning conductors. With spirit of adventure, I called to ask if it was still possible to apply. The audition was successful, and I became the music director of the Utica Symphony, a semi-professional orchestra. The position came as a package with a part-time Assistant Professorship at the local college to teach violin and composition. This new school, part of Syracuse University, used makeshift classrooms, but at least I had my own office, and a school library room where I could compose. It was in this school library/cafeteria that I wrote every note of my Fantasia for String Quartet (1960). The noise and the constant chatter failed to distract me. I enjoyed writing this piece, on commission from the Harvard Musical Association in Massachusetts, a contest I had won which included a première by members of the Boston Symphony, at the Harvard Musical Association’s beautiful salons. The première, in the spring of 1961 was a wonderful event. The next time it was played was in Washington, DC at the Inter-American Music Festival. I was unable to attend, but was amused by the Washington Post’s review, which declared it an “instant hit, a veritable 1812 of string quartets.” That was not what I had in mind at all, but I was delighted that it had communicated so well. Later, Wladimir Lakond, the editor at Peer Music, suggested a string orchestra version of it, with double basses added, and he published both versions. As time passes, I still feel very close to this piece which just poured out of my pen in less than a week.

During my first years with Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra in New York I was still writing music regularly, mostly encouraged by him and some of his best musicians. Stokowski had assembled an orchestra with some of the best free-lance virtuoso musicians in the New York area. Two of the star performers were Paul Price, who commissioned my Symphony for Percussion for his Manhattan Percussion Ensemble, and Davis Shulman, who commissioned a work for trombone and strings. I received a commission from the American Accordionists Association to write a work for accordion and chamber orchestra, the Passacaglia and Perpetuum Mobile, for accordion and chamber orchestra (1966). The instrument was entirely foreign to me, but Elsie Bennett, longtime president of the organization, and the brains behind their massive commissioning series, lent me an accordion, which I studied for weeks. It was a great challenge, because the chords provided by the buttons on the left side of the instrument were ready-set, giving the composer very little freedom for tonal imagination and variety. The instrument has since then been improved, and composers today do not have that problem. I gave the commissioning organization a bonus, a piece for solo accordion, which I wrote at the same time.

As life grew busier with conducting tours and the direction of international festivals, I saw my composing time brought to a halt. What broke the ice, some fifteen years after my last works, was a combination of circumstances. For my festival in Miami I had commissioned Elliott Carter to write his Fourth String Quartet which we premièred together with new works by many other composers. In 1987 I had ten prominent composers write new works especially for Lucas Drew, one of the foremost double-bass virtuosos in America. He insisted, however, that I add my own contribution to the list. My small contribution to Lucas Drew’s series of commissions was George & Muriel. (1986), for the unusual ensemble of double-bass, double-bass choir, and wordless off-stage chorus. I found that writing this short piece, after so many years, was as if I had never stopped composing, and it encouraged me to continue. At that time, my close friends George and Muriel Marek were about to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary and I could not think of a more personal gift for them than a new composition. This work does not intend to be in any way a portrait of the Mareks. It is a work I may have written anyway. The music reflects what was on my mind at that moment, my most intimate thoughts, and as such it is my humble but deeply felt homage to George and Muriel Marek.

Symphony No. 3 and other works  Composer:  José Serebrier