By Kyle MacMillan
Shulamit Ran was not looking for a job, so the then up-and-coming New York composer was completely taken by surprise when she got a call in 1973 from the University of Chicago offering her a faculty position. It took a little persuasion, but she decided to take a chance and move across country to a city she didn’t know. Ran has never regretted the decision, fending off offers from elsewhere and staying at the institution for 42 years. “Chicago surprised me,” she said, “It’s a great, great city.”
She has gone on to become a pillar of the Windy City’s classical scene as a composer, teacher, and tireless advocate for new music, including seven years as the second composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “For me,” said Augusta Read Thomas, another well-known Chicago composer (and Ran’s immediate successor in residence with the CSO) who has always looked up to her, “Shulamit is a Chicago icon. A fantastic composer. She’s beloved by the musicians of the city, by the composers of the city. She’s a real superstar.”
During her residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Shulamit Ran composed Legends for Orchestra to commemorate the centennials of both the CSO and the University of Chicago. Conducted by Daniel Barenboim (standing left, applauding), whose advocacy and performances of her music helped lead to her appointment with the orchestra, the work received its premiere by the CSO in October 1993. [Photo: Jim Steere]
Ran, 73, has gained national and even international fame for her wide swath of solo, chamber, orchestral, choral, and operatic works, winning in 1991 the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the ultimate imprimatur of compositional excellence in the United States. Although she is less widely known than some other contemporary winners like Wynton Marsalis or John Adams, Arthur Fagen, who conducted the premieres of both her operas, believes she is worthy recipient: “I think that her writing has lasting significance.”
[Photo: Valerie Booth]
The composer’s music was first featured at Ravinia Festival by Chicago Pro Musica that same prizewinning year, presenting her Concerto da Camera II (1987), and then the following summer she was invited to host a chamber program of works by women composers. Ran returned in 2014 as composer-in-residence at Ravinia Steans Music Institute, working with its fellows to prepare a performance of her string sextet Lyre of Orpheus (2008). At the top of the Chicago Symphony’s July 15 concert, at long last her larger-scale music receives its first airing at Ravinia, with the orchestra returning to a selection that it premiered in 1991. Chief Conductor Marin Alsop wanted a short work to open the evening, and Ran suggested Chicago Skyline.
The 5–6 minute fanfare for brass and percussion was commissioned by WFMT-FM 98.7 to mark its 40th anniversary. As inspiration, the composer chose to focus on the city’s spectacular skyline, a portion of which she could see from her E. Randolph St. apartment that overlooks what is now Millennium Park and Michigan Avenue. “I still remember the shock of excitement I had the first time when I arrived in Chicago from O’Hare, [riding] in a cab through the city and seeing this great skyline that opened for me,” she said.
“It caught my breath in such a way that I felt this was something that I had to write music to.”
For much of her early life in her native Israel, Ran seemed to be in a hurry, reaching milestones at a much younger age than most other children, starting with composing, which she began when she was just 7. Of course, at the time, she didn’t know she was “composing.” Many Israeli poets like Nathan Alterman and Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote works for children, and when she learned some of them in school, the budding composer instinctively set them to music. “I would sing them,” she said. “That seemed like the thing to do.” One day, she was reading a story to her mother that included the text to a character’s song, and Ran sang the words. Her mother wanted to know if it was a song that she had learned in school, and the girl simply pointed to the words and said the music was there. “From my standpoint, the melody was associated with the words,” she said. “And it just had to be there.”
Around the same time, Ran discovered a piano at a friend’s house. “It seemed like a most wonderful toy,” she said, “an amazing thing, and I loved it.” She came home and managed to talk to her parents into buying an upright piano, and she soon began lessons with a teacher who lived on the same street. She performed some of her songs for him, and he transcribed them. Unbeknownst to her or her parents, the teacher sent some of those songs to the Israel Broadcasting Authority. One day, a letter came in the mail announcing that two of her songs would be performed by a children’s choir on a radio show called Children’s Corner. She was at a summer camp when the broadcast aired, and all the kids gathered around the radio and listened. “That really was an amazing turning point in my life,” Ran said. Before she was even 9 years old, the youngster realized what would become her life’s work: “I said to myself, This is what I want to do. This is how I want to spend my life, hearing my music performed by others.”
Soon thereafter, her first piano teacher recommended she move on for more advanced studies, so she began lessons with Israeli composer Alexander Uriah Boskovich and his wife, Miriam, who was a pianist. A few years later, she for played Nadia Reisenberg during a visit by the noted pianist to Israel. Reisenberg urged Ran to come to New York’s Mannes School of Music, where she taught at the time, and arranged a scholarship for the upstart Israeli musician. So, again, considerably earlier than most other people would have made such life-changing journey, she traveled to the United States at 14. She studied piano with Reisenberg and composition with Norman Dello Joio, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1957, earning an Artist’s Diploma in both fields in 1967.
[Photo: Dan Rest]
For a few years, she did a fair amount of concertizing, giving her less time for composing. But her focus switched more firmly in the direction of the latter in 1969 with the completion of O, the Chimneys, which culminated Ran’s 1992 Ravinia program. It consists of five settings for voice, chamber ensemble, and tape of poems by the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature co-winner, Nelly Sachs, who wrote primarily about the Holocaust. The composer encountered a book of Sachs’s poems during a visit to a Fifth Avenue bookstore and opened it to one titled “A Dead Child Speaks”: “I read that poem and it caught my breath in such a way that I felt this was something that I had to write music to.” Ran served as pianist for the first performance, which was part of a concert she anchored at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970.
The Vox Turnabout label released an LP recording of O, the Chimneys with soprano Gloria Davy as the flipside to another work by the then better-known composer George Rochberg. That recording reached the hands of the well-respected composer Ralph Shapey, who taught from 1964 through 1991 at the U of C. At the time, the music department was in the midst of a search for a junior-level composing professor. “Shapey marched into the chair’s office, threw the LP on his table and said, ‘That’s our composer,’ ” Ran said, relating a story she heard later from Shapey and the department chair.
The 23-year-old was offered an assistant professorship, which she ultimately accepted, though she wasn’t sure she could ever love another American city as much as New York. In addition to the students she had a chance to mentor, she was constantly enriched during her U of C tenure by her access to ensembles like the Chicago Symphony and the chance to serve as artistic director of the school’s widely respected Contemporary Chamber Players (later Contempo) from 2002 through her retirement in 2015. “The University of Chicago—there could not have been a better home for me than that institution,” she said.
Ran served as composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony from 1990 through 1997, a considerably longer tenure than what are now typically two- or three-year appointments. The previous composer-in-residence, John Corigliano, introduced Ran’s Concerto for Orchestra (1986) to Daniel Barenboim, who would become the orchestra’s music director in 1991. He agreed to conduct it in 1988, performances that helped lead to her residency. In addition to getting some of her works performed, she served as an advocate for contemporary music and uncovered new music that she thought was significant and that meshed well with Barenboim’s taste and temperament. “It was a remarkable opportunity,” she said, “to hear as much music as I wanted, played at the highest possible level and get to know the musicians and have this sense of camaraderie and collaborative spirit.”
For the 20th season of the CSO’s MusicNOW contemporary works series, 2015–2018 CSO composers in residence Samuel Adams and Elizabeth Ogonek (second and third from left) kicked things off by honoring their predecessors—(pictured from left) Augusta Read Thomas (1997–2006), John Corigliano (1987–1990), Shulamit Ran (1990–1997), and Mason Bates (2010–2015), as well as (not pictured) Anna Clyne (2010–2015), Osvaldo Golijov (2006–2010), and Mark-Anthony Turnage (2006–2010—with an evening devoted to their music. [Photo: Todd Rosenberg]
During the last three years of that residency, she also held the same position at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where she was tasked with writing a new opera for the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists (now the Ryan Opera Center), the company’s professional training program. She wrote a piece titled Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk), which was rooted in a wandering, disembodied spirit from Jewish folklore that implants itself in a living person. After the premiere in 1997, the opera was revived three years later in Bielefeld, Germany, but not since. An impediment to further performances, which Ran is eager to see happen, has been the lack of a proper recording or video of the work.
“It was a remarkable opportunity to hear as much music as I wanted, played at the highest possible level, and to have this camaraderie and collaborative spirit.”
In March, Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music presented the world premiere of Anne Frank, Ran’s second opera and arguably one of the most important accomplishments of her career. The idea for the work, the first large-scale opera based on Frank’s account of her family’s harrowing attempt to elude the Nazis during the Holocaust, came from Dennis Hanthorn, general director of Atlanta Opera from 2004 through 2012. He had seen Between Two Worlds and thought she would be ideal for the project. Ran jumped at the chance, joining forces with her previous librettist, Charles Kondek, to create what became a 2½-hour opera with nine principals and a large choir and orchestra.
But by the time the long process to secure the rights to the story from the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel was completed, Hanthorn had left his position and Atlanta Opera was no longer interested. Fagen, the company’s music director, stepped in and brought the opera to Indiana University, where he serves as co-chair of the department of orchestral conducting. “I never have the feeling with Shulamit Ran, which I do with many other composers, that she superimposes a particular style or particular language onto her composition,” Fagen said. “Anne Frank inspired her to write in a certain way. It’s all motivated from inside rather than coming from outside. I find that her writing has tremendous humanity, and she is in command of such a variety of styles and the use of the orchestra that she is able to adjust to whatever the situation is in a way that is very rare.”
As director of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute Program for Piano & Strings, violinist Miriam Fried invited Ran to hold a summer residency in 2014, including to guide a sextet of fellows in the rehearsal and performance of Ran’s Lyre of Orpheus. On July 15, Fried will be the soloist on Brahms’s Violin Concerto following the CSO’s performance of Ran’s Chicago Skyline.
Thomas, a U of C professor whose preludial composition Sun Dance will be performed August 5 at Ravinia by the Chicago Symphony, cites several qualities that run through Ran’s music, starting with its natural, overt musicality: “You can hear her singing those notes or playing them at the piano, and I really admire that about it.” Second, Thomas called Ran a masterful colorist, who capitalizes on the intrinsic sound and character of each instrument. Third, Ran’s music often contains folk elements, what Thomas called “Hebrew twists of phrase.” “It’s like a thumbprint,” the younger composer said. One work that encapsulates all these elements is Grand Rounds (2018) for 13 players, which was commissioned by the U of C’s Center for Contemporary Composition. “It’s just right there,” Thomas said.
What will be Ran’s musical legacy? Thomas believes it’s too soon to know for sure. “It’s very hard to analyze a composer’s standing,” she said, “because history takes time.” But she believes that Ran’s music will be remembered and performed. “Over the long run,” she said, “when there is a body of work that has substantial meaning, emotion, craft, eloquence and personality, those pieces survive. They go on. People find them and continue to come back to them. I believe her work has already had that kind of ripple effect and will continue to for centuries.” ■
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.