Collage Stirrings
by Frank Epstein

Beginnings
It was as a percussion student at the Tanglewood Music Center that I got my introduction to the world of new music. For three summers, 1961, 1965 and 1966, I was exposed to the amazing musician Gunther Schuller, his openness to anything new, boundless energy, and enthusiasm for performing new music as well as we expect to perform Mozart and Brahms. That exposure became an inspiration that has lasted throughout my life. 

When I first applied to the TMC (then known as the Berkshire Music Center), admission auditions were not required. Instead a letter of recommendation from someone very respected was what I needed. As it happened, many years earlier in the 1930s, Paul Fromm, a young German man who was in his family’s wine business, frequently rented a room from Hannah Friedensohn (my grandmother) during his travels. When he met her daughter Margit, he took an interest in her, escorting her to concerts and the opera, and playing piano duets with her. That relationship might have blossomed more, but Margit was in love with a Paul Epstein—and it was Paul Epstein whom she eventually married.

As the political situation in Germany grew more and more threatening, the couple and their young son, Peter (my brother), moved to Holland. Paul Fromm, still in Germany, began sending gifts to the Epsteins, mostly books with money hidden in the covers. The idea was that they would deposit the money for him in case he needed it or had to leave Germany in a hurry. In fact, he did leave and moved to the United States in 1938.

Twenty-three years later, my mother contacted Paul Fromm, then living in Chicago, to ask him if he would write a letter of support for my admission to Tanglewood. By then, Fromm’s championship of new music was known world-wide, and the Fromm Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, which had begun in 1956, was well established. Fortunately, he agreed to write a recommendation letter, and I got into the program.  

Even though an audition to get into the program wasn’t required in 1961 (it’s quite different now), all admitted students were expected to play for the head of the program when they arrived in Lenox. At my audition, the famed Gunther Schuller pulled out Lukas Foss’s Time Cycle and directed me to a tricky passage in quintuplets that was to be played on two different instruments. Since I’d never actually seen a quintuplet before, I pretty much botched that audition. 

Despite that disappointing beginning, I did end up being invited back to Tanglewood for two more summers after the first one. And in 1968, I was invited for a fourth summer, but I had auditioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra that year and had won the position. So, when I came to Tanglewood in 1968, it was not as a student, but as the newest member of the BSO. 

As exciting as it was to be in the orchestra, I began to miss much of what the Tanglewood Music Center had given me, mostly a deep exposure to new music and opportunity to be part of discussions with composers and conductors. Over those three summers, new music had planted a seed, and I began to think about creating an ensemble that focused not on the standard symphonic repertoire, but on contemporary chamber music, mostly by living composers. One of my inspirations had been a Tanglewood roommate, Robert Selig, a highly enthusiastic young composer and a highly enthusiastic character. Much of my deep regard for the spirit and creative force of all composers came from knowing Bob. He later joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory but, unfortunately, passed away at the age of forty-five.

First concerts & first players
November at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. On the program were Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 1, for flute and electronic sounds, George Crumb’s Three Madrigals, Jacob Druckman’s solo double bass piece Valentine, Ernest Krenek’s Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, and Lukas Foss’s Time Cycle, that same piece that had nearly been my downfall years earlier at my audition for Gunther Schuller. But by 1971, I had learned how to play a quintuplet! 

That UMass concert also included a new work composed for the ensemble by Tibor Pusztai. Nocturnes involved complex electronics with each instrument amplified, the signals sent through a mixer, and the volumes controlled so that the sounds moved in surprising ways among the loudspeakers arrayed around the room. A fairly novel idea for 1971. Unfortunately, during the performance, the electronics began to crackle and pop, smoke rose, and everything came to a halt. Tibor tried to figure out what was wrong, but when we started over, it had to be without the clever electronics. Not an auspicious premiere, either for Tibor’s Nocturne, or for the brand-new Collage!

After the UMass Amherst concert, we carried variations of that program to several other places—Franconia College in New Hampshire, Stony Brook University, Georgetown University, the Walnut Hill School, and to Tanglewood as part of the Fromm Festival. Then, in Jordan Hall on February 2, 1973, we gave our first Boston performance. The conservatory billed the concert as the “Collage Debut.”

The program included music from those first performances—Davidovsky, Foss, and Pusztai (now with electronics that didn’t blow up)—as well as Hymn for Cello and Bass by Robert Ceely, and Quartet: The Three Seasons of Autumn by my Tanglewood friend, Robert Selig. It also included the premiere of a new work by the twenty-year old English composer Oliver Knussen. All through his life, Olly would have a difficult time meeting deadlines, and his new piece came to me just a few pages at a time. To get each installment to me, Olly would go to Heathrow Airport, ask some unsuspecting Boston-bound passenger to deliver a folder of music to somebody named Frank Epstein who would be at the gate at Logan Airport. I would wait for the plane, armed only with Olly’s description of that day’s courier, and try to spot the exiting passenger who looked nervous about carrying a mysterious package. All this, of course, was when you could still meet passengers at the gate. I ended up making four or five trips to the airport to retrieve the next section. Finally, just a few days before the concert, Olly himself arrived with his completed Océan de Terre. 

Ensemble loyalty 
Most of the first members of Collage had been students at Tanglewood and were now in the BSO—violinist Ron Knudsen, cellist Ronald Feldman, flutist Paul Fried, clarinetist Peter Hadcock, bassist Larry Wolfe, and myself. Chris Kies, our pianist for nearly a decade, was the only player not in the orchestra. We also included a dancer, Ina Hahn, who taught at Boston Conservatory and was known as both a Broadway and a modern dancer. And a new-music specialist, soprano Joan Heller, was with us from the beginning and sang innumerable works with us.

Soon after our Boston “debut,” clarinetist Felix Viscuglia replaced Pete Hadcock, and then on two days’ notice, Bob Annis stepped in when Felix became ill. I soon invited Bob to become a member, and when he retired from the group in 2017, his tenure was the longest of anyone in the group. Early on, harpist Ann Hobson Pilot also became a member, and James Orleans became our double bassist in 1978, remaining with the ensemble for many years. In November 1979, Joel Moerschel played his first concert with us, and he was a mainstay of the ensemble for thirty-eight years. In 1980, pianist Christopher Oldfather first appeared with Collage and, except for a brief absence necessitated by work in New York, he has been with the group ever since. His tenure now exceeds even Joel’s and Bob’s.

When flutist Paul Fried stepped down in 1980, Chris Krueger began playing with the ensemble. Randy Bowman joined the ensemble a few years later, but Chris returned to the ensemble in 1991, and he was a member until 2017. The violinists who would follow Ron Knudsen have also been distinguished: first, Joel Smirnoff (who joined in 1980), Ronan Lefkowitz (during the 1985-86 season), and now, for many years, Catherine French. And when I gradually stepped down from playing in the ensemble, Craig McNutt picked up where I left off. Of course, countless other superb musicians have performed with the group, some quite frequently, but when I think about it, I am amazed at how steadfast and loyal the personnel, all wonderful colleagues and musicians, have remained over these fifty years!

Conductors
When Collage began, we thought we’d perform without a conductor, and we mostly did so for a few years. But that first performance of Foss’s Time Cycle, music with only five musicians, had taken us thirty-two rehearsals to prepare! Olly Knussen’s Océan de Terre needed two conductors. And, when we encountered the Donald Sur Catena III, for its premiere, we knew it was going to be impossible without a conductor; Larry Wolfe stepped into that role. We eventually realized that someone who wasn’t also having to play this difficult music could help us accomplish our goals far more easily, especially as we began to program music with somewhat larger ensembles.

So, over the years, Collage has invited many musicians to work with us as guests. Of the composers who were also conductors, Charles Fussell, John Harbison and Gunther Schuller appeared with us most frequently. Other composer-conductors, who have led their own music or entire programs, were Theodore Antoniou, William Kraft, Robert DiDomenica, Leon Kirchner, Oliver Knussen, Fred Lerdahl (conducting his Eros), Alan MacMillan, Stephen Mosko, John Peel, Leonard Roseman, Donald Sur (that was quite an experience), and Barry Vercoe. As well, Robert Black, Christopher Kendall (21st Century Consort in Washington, D.C.), John Oliver (Tanglewood Festival Chorus), James Yannatos (Harvard University Orchestra), Philip Kelsey (later Cantata Singers, and now Seattle Opera’s assistant conductor), David Epstein (MIT Orchestra), Arthur Weisberg (bassoonist and Contemporary Chamber Ensemble founder) all conducted the ensemble. And, in 1976, a young David Hoose appeared with Collage for the first time.

In February 1979, at the Loeb Drama Center (ART), Seiji Ozawa also conducted Collage. His rehearsals of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot were memorable, if only because they took place—as they did for many years—in my crowded basement, sandwiched among the timpani, support posts, and the washing machine. It was winter and Ozawa showed up wearing his bright orange ski jacket. But after rehearsing a while he stopped and exhorted, “You know, it is too hot to leave my jacket on and it is too cold to take it off!” My basement was unheated, and he continued with his jacket on.

Some unusual events
We’ve performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire numerous times, and always with marvelous soloists. But one of our early and memorable performances was in 1980, when the 60-year old Phyllis Curtin was performing that role for her first time. The following summer, we repeated Pierrot at Tanglewood.

In 1983, we gave an unusual joint concert with the John Oliver Chorale. On the program was Schoenberg’s Drei Satiren, op. 28, a difficult work to perform and, perhaps, equally difficult to listen to. But it also included Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and music of Percy Grainger—music easy to listen to—and the world premiere of Deliverance—Amen, An Oratorio, by William Thomas McKinley. Tom, a fixture at NEC for more than twenty years, was a staggeringly prolific composer—he said “I’m composing all the time, as if I was dictated”—and he was an enviably self-confident person. His improvisational and sometimes long-winded musical trances reminded me of water slowly coming to a boil and then evaporating. And his pieces were often enormous. When we premiered and recorded his Paintings 7, with Schuller conducting, I remember having to bring almost my complete arsenal of percussion instruments, and hauling in all those instruments was almost as exhausting as playing this mini-percussion concerto.

After a concert at Symphony Hall in 1991, given in conjunction with the MIT Media Lab and the composer Todd Machover, we held a drawing. One of the prizes was to be a cymbal lesson with me. Much to my surprise, the winner of the drawing was Yo-Yo Ma! When he asked when his lesson would be, I was a bit intimidated at the thought of giving him a cymbal lesson, so I stalled, saying I’d get in touch with him. Every summer, for years after, Yo-Yo would find me at Tanglewood and ask, “When?” I still owe him that lesson.  

I also fondly remember a 1985 concert that we shared with the Underground Railroad Theatre, a very creative company that often focuses on social concerns. I had first been wowed by their work at a Symphony Hall youth concert, where shadow-puppets gave a startling take on Stravinsky’s Firebird. I don’t remember who contacted whom, but the URT created a powerful adaptation of Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat. Actors, outsized masks, and gigantic puppets moving about the Sanders Theatre stage on rolling platforms told the story of a soldier and his violin, a dancer, and the devil by setting it during the Vietnam War as a powerful anti-war statement. Debra Wise, who is still artistic director of the company, and the very imaginative Wes Sanders, with whom I remained friends for many years after, were the energy behind this unusual project. David Hoose led a terrific musical performance, and everyone was thrilled.

And some traveling
In the earliest years, Collage toured a bit, although it became more challenging as the group expanded, musicians’ schedules grew more complicated, and more and more new music groups began to develop along the East Coast. Over the years, though, the ensemble performed in Hershey PA, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and at Franconia College in New Hampshire, the Currier Gallery, Brooklyn Academy of Music, MIT, Amherst College, Wesleyan University, Northeastern University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Stony Brook University, Georgetown University, the Boston Shakespeare Company Theater, Holy Cross College, and the Miller Theatre at Columbia University. Collage has also appeared four times on the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

Among those out-of-town highlights was a 1974 performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, when we were invited by Charles Schwartz, composer and author of George Gershwin: His Life and Music. He had organized a series combining artists from different fields, and on that program was the premiere of Schwartz’s own Riffs, a jazz-influenced piece he had composed for Collage and the brilliant trumpeter Clark Terry. Since I had never played drum set—requiring very different skills than an orchestra percussionist might have—this was a real challenge for me. All I can say about the experience is that I have an LP (later a CD) to prove it happened.

We returned to the Whitney two seasons later to perform an expanded version of Schwartz’s piece, now called Professor Jive, again with Clark Terry. An added excitement was a performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Missa super l’Homme armé that featured Vanessa Redgrave as the Narrator.

Essential help & our first series
Many generous people helped Collage get off the ground. Counsel and support came from Judy Cabot, whose husband was on the board of the MFA; Francis Coolidge, an attorney at Ropes & Gray; and Nick Anagnostis, corporate secretary for Amoskeag Corporation, who was an avid new music enthusiast and would become an early board president. Over many years, Nick never ceased to share his sage advice and opinion, which he gave over his tiny eyeglasses or monocle. Those early board meetings took place at the Cabot’s home in Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill, or at Amoskeag’s corporate headquarters, around the largest boardroom table I had ever seen. One time, we met in Boston Harbor on a large ship that Nick’s company owned. And, as it happened, one of our players was a friend of Emily Kernan (later president of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art), who had a friend who was close to the architect Graham Gund. So, with that circuitous connection established, we began our first concert series in 1974—in the Graham Gund Contemporary Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts.

At the MFA, we programmed works that worked with the themes of the visual art being shown. Among a display of metal sculptures, we performed Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Giacinto Scelsi’s very metallic-sounding Okanagon. For a show of figurative-modernist paintings by Horacio Torres, we gave a concert that included music of Davidovsky, Berio and Schuller. And for a 1975 opening of avant-garde works, we programmed George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale, and Lunar Possession Manual by one of the “bad boys” of new music, Burr Van Nostrand. Van Nostrand’s scores were, in themselves, works of art, filled with huge slashes, giant arrows, squiggly lines all suggesting whoops and screams—but very few staves, pitches or rhythms. Gunther Schuller somehow conducted, and Joan Heller jumped up and down to the piece’s extremes.

After several years, the MFA closed the contemporary gallery and, for a while, we performed in a room filled with Raphael paintings. It took only a short while to realize this was less than suitable for our music. So we moved around a lot: Brown Hall and Jordan Hall at NEC; Radcliffe College’s Agassiz Theatre; Harvard’s Sanders Theatre and Paine Hall; the Tsai Center at BU; First & Second Church in Boston; and at various times, Longy School. Then, in 1994, we happily landed at the C. Walsh Theater at Suffolk University, where the ensemble was welcomed enthusiastically and enjoyed a residency for many years. The Suffolk students attended our concerts without charge, though some music professors did expect them to write papers about their concert experiences. When that residency ended, we began performing most frequently at Longy School.

Musical guidance & organizational support
During our formative years, mostly during the years of our MFA series, we invited the composers who had written music for us to become Collage members, and they and the performers divided equally any concert proceeds. A great resource to me in the early years proved to be composers Charles Fussell, John Harbison, John Heiss, Ron Perera and Ivan Tcherepnin, advisors who helped define the overall direction and character of our programming. And, for three seasons, Harbison shared the music director duties with me, and his immense musical knowledge, especially of younger composers, was invaluable; today he remains an important resource. 

Collage’s yearly fundraisers, held for twenty-two incredible years in the beautiful home of Susan and Gary Delong, have brought an impressive succession of illuminating and entertaining guest speakers. Many of our guests have been composers—Peter Child, Charles Fussell, Michael Gandolfi, Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, John Heiss, Gunther Schuller, Augusta Read Thomas, Andy Vores and Yehudi Wyner. Writers/music critics Lloyd Schwartz and Richard Dyer, musical raconteur Ron Della Chiesa, BSO administrator Anthony Fogg, and performers Phyllis Curtin, Robert Levin, Janna Baty, Joel Smirnoff, and Tony Arnold have also given us insight into their musical lives and thoughts about the importance of music to all of us. Every one of these conversations with our music director has been gratifying. But when our own Chris Oldfather was our invited guest, David had asked him only a couple of questions when Chris abruptly stood up and said, “I don’t want to talk,” and he sat down to regale everybody with his brilliant playing.

Changing roles
In 1991, after twenty years of leading Collage, I thought it was time to turn the ensemble’s musical direction over to someone else. I met with David Hoose, who had been conducting us successfully as a guest for many years, and over lunch I offered him the music directorship. I don’t remember if he accepted on the spot or went off to think about it, but over thirty years later, David remains our music director. His conducting is musically and technically fabulous, he works very well with our incredibly skilled players, and his programming has great substance and depth (though I do sometimes push him this way and that).

When I stepped down as Collage’s musical leader, I took on the board presidency, and I am still here. We’ve built the board slowly, lucky to find people who are enthusiastic and supportive in so many ways, and these people have become a sort of family to all of us. I am forever grateful to them. Ruth Scheer, Susan DeLong, Françoise Moros, Doane Perry, Bob Annis, Elsa Miller, John Kochevar and Ferdinando Buonanno now make up this amazing group.

As Collage presents its 50th season, I look back over all these years—the enormous amount of all kinds of music (more than 580 works by more than 260 composers) we’ve brought to life and the wonderful people I’ve met and worked with—and I can only be proud. This has been, and still is, an amazing ride. Although I do miss the actual playing, I am as excited about our programs today as I was fifty years ago. And I remain excited by the people who have helped create Collage—the composers, players, singers, conductors, board members, and you, our audience. All of these people have made, and continue to make, Collage New Music a satisfying adventure. Thank you!