Meyer Kupferman, Composer in Many Forms, Dies at 77
   By ALLAN KOZINN

   Published: December 3, 2003

   Meyer Kupferman, a prolific composer whose music embraced
   both jazz and 12-tone techniques, died on Wednesday near
   Rhinebeck, N.Y.  He was 77 and lived in Rhinebeck.

   The cause was heart failure, said William Anderson, a guitarist
   who has performed Mr.  Kupferman's music and is a friend of
   the family.

   Mr.  Kupferman embraced virtually every form available to
   contemporary composers, writing 12 symphonies, nine ballets
   and seven operas, along with electronic pieces, works that
   combine taped sounds and live instruments and soundtrack music
   for films.  He composed 10 concertos, dozens of picturesque
   orchestral works and more than 200 chamber and solo works.

   He was omnivorous stylistically, too, a quality he traced
   back to childhood memories of his father's singing Yiddish
   and Romanian songs to him, which he would imitate on the
   clarinet, an instrument that he also used to imitate solos
   in the big band jazz he heard on the radio.

   He embodied some of these influences - as well as elements
   of the Serialism that fascinated him later - in "The Garden
   of My Father's House," a vibrant 1972 work for violin and
   clarinet dedicated to his father's memory.

   Those influences can be heard, in different proportions, in
   many of his other works.

   Mr.  Kupferman was born in New York on July 3, 1926.  After
   a brief encounter with the violin, at age 5, he was drawn to
   the clarinet when he was 10.  He studied at the High School
   of Music and Art and at Queens College, but although his
   formal studies embraced music theory and orchestral and chamber
   performance he regarded himself as a self-taught composer.

   Practical considerations dictated the shape of his early
   career.  Working as a jazz clarinetist in clubs on Coney
   Island, he began scoring arrangements for the bands he performed
   with, and for other musicians.

   By the late 1940's, when he was in his early 20's, he began
   concentrating on concert music.  He wrote the first of several
   piano concertos in 1948, also the year he completed his first
   opera, a one-act children's work, "In a Garden," based on
   Gertrude Stein's "First Reader."

   To hear his music performed, he persuaded some of his colleagues
   to form an orchestra, called Composers Workshop.  Among the
   members of the ensemble who eventually became well-known
   composers were Morton Feldman, Allan Blank and Seymour Shifrin.

   When Mr.  Kupferman became interested in 12-tone composition
   in the 1950's, he sought ways to retain the lyricism that had
   been an attraction of his earlier music.  One solution was
   to develop a single tone row that through repetition in several
   works would become familiar.  Another was to temper it with
   some of the influences that had always given his music its
   particular accent.

   These solutions propel the "Cycle of Infinities," a set of
   more than 30 works, composed between 1961 and 1983.  All 30
   were based on the same tone row, but the works could hardly
   have been more different.  Among them were full-length recitals
   for solo instruments, chamber pieces, a cantata and a three-act
   opera, "The Judgement" (1966).

   The jazz of Mr.  Kupferman's youth continued to interest him.
   Several works - including many of the "Infinities" - call for
   a jazz ensemble.  His String Quartet No.  6 bore the title
   "Jazz Quartet," and when his "Jazz Symphony" was given its
   premiere by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in 1988, he said
   it was a piece that he had been wanting to write for 40 years.
   Reviewing it in The New York Times, Bernard Holland wrote
   that Mr.  Kupferman was on to something.

   "Here jazz and the symphonic style meet and argue, but they
   never really come to terms," Mr.  Holland wrote.  "The composer,
   in other words, seems to know which differences of rhythm,
   phrase and color are irreconcilable.  He does not force them
   together."

   In addition to composing, Mr.  Kupferman taught composition
   and directed an improvisatory ensemble at Sarah Lawrence
   College from 1951 to 1993.  He also published "Atonal Jazz"
   (Dorn) a two-volume study of chromatic techniques in contemporary
   jazz in 1992.

   Mr.  Kupferman is survived by his wife, Pei Fen; his daughter,
   Lisa Pitt, of Putnam, N.Y., three stepsons, Fung Chin and
   Sung Chin, of Westfield, N.J., and Yung Chin, of Chappaqua,
   N.Y., and five grandchildren.

Eric Goldberg <[log in to unmask]>