Kirke Mechem is an American composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

. His first opera, Tartuffe

Tartuffe (Mechem)

Tartuffe is an opera in three acts by Kirke Mechem. Mechem also wrote the English libretto. Based on the Molière's play Tartuffe, or the Impostor, it is a modern opera buffa set in Paris in the 17th century...

, with nearly 400 performances in six countries, has become one of the most popular operas written by an American. He has composed more than 250 works in almost every form. In 2002, ASCAP registered performances of his music in 42 countries. He is often called the "dean of American choral composers" (G. Schirmer bio).

Biography

Mechem was born August 16, 1925 in Wichita, Kansas

Wichita, Kansas

Wichita is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas.As of the 2010 census, the city population was 382,368. Located in south-central Kansas on the Arkansas River, Wichita is the county seat of Sedgwick County and the principal city of the Wichita metropolitan area...

. His family moved to Topeka when he was five. His father was a writer of published novels, plays and poetry and was director of the Kansas State Historical Society. His mother was a German-trained concert pianist. Mechem began studying piano with his mother at an early age but was more interested in sports. He later worked for a time as a sports reporter for the Topeka Daily Capital. He played popular music by ear and at age seventeen began writing what he describes as "stacks of wretched songs." During World War II, he served two and half years in the army, then enrolled at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 as an English major, intending to follow in his father's footsteps as a writer. Out of curiosity he took a harmony course taught by Harold Schmidt, the choral director, who later became the principal influence on his development as a choral composer and conductor. He continued his study of harmony and counterpoint, changing his major to music at the end of his junior year. His principal teachers at Stanford were Leonard Ratner (harmony, counterpoint) and Sandor Salgo

Sandor Salgo

Sandor Salgo was born Hungarian-born composer. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1909, Sandor Salgo studied music in Budapest. A clear standout, his early career was affected by the prewar Anti-Semitism then prevalent in Hungary. In 1937, Sandor Salgo and a string quartet would...

 (orchestration and conducting). In his senior year, Mechem orchestrated and conducted the student variety show. He earned a masters degree at Harvard in 1953, studying composition with Walter Piston

Walter Piston

Walter Hamor Piston Jr., , was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter....

 and Randall Thompson

Randall Thompson

Randall Thompson was an American composer, particularly noted for his choral works.-Career:He attended Harvard University, became assistant professor of music and choir director at Wellesley College, and received a doctorate in music from the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music...

, and was winner of the Boott Prize for vocal composition. He was assistant choral director for three years at Stanford, composing both choral and instrumental music and conducting an opera. He lived in Vienna, Austria in 1956-57 and 1961-63. During his first year there he turned down a teaching and conducting post at Harvard in order to devote as much time as possible to composition. In 1963 Mechem returned to the Bay Area with his wife and children and settled into the house in San Francisco where he still lives. He became composer-in-residence at the University of San Francisco

University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco , is a private, Jesuit/Catholic university located in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1855, USF was established as the first university in San Francisco. It is the second oldest institution for higher learning in California and the tenth-oldest university of...

 and has also taught at many other universities as a guest composer and conductor. In the early 1970s, Mechem and his family moved to London for a year.

Career

Most of Mechem's early work was for chorus

Choir

A choir, chorale or chorus is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform.A body of singers who perform together as a group is called a choir or chorus...

. Some of these pieces, composed as an undergraduate and graduate student, were published and have become staples of the choral literature, including "Make A Joyful Noise", (recorded by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

Mormon Tabernacle Choir

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, sometimes colloquially referred to as MoTab, is a Grammy and Emmy Award winning, 360-member, all-volunteer choir. The choir is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . However, the choir is completely self-funded, traveling and producing albums to...

) and "Give Thanks Unto The Lord." The latter won the tri-annual SAI American Music Award and helped thrust Mechem's choral work into prominence. His Opus 5 was a Suite for Piano, later followed by a Piano Sonata and a book of teaching pieces called Whims. In Vienna, he began writing chamber music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

. His Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano was followed by a Divertimento for Flute and String Trio, and by his first String Quartet, which was the only American prize-winner at the fourth International Concourse for Composition in Monaco

Monaco

Monaco , officially the Principality of Monaco , is a sovereign city state on the French Riviera. It is bordered on three sides by its neighbour, France, and its centre is about from Italy. Its area is with a population of 35,986 as of 2011 and is the most densely populated country in the...

.

Mechem's first major orchestral success was the 1965 San Francisco Symphony

San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony is an orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980, the orchestra has performed at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus are part of the organization...

 premiere of his Symphony No. 1 under Josef Krips

Josef Krips

Josef Alois Krips was an Austrian conductor and violinist.-Biography:Krips was born in Vienna and went on to become a pupil of Eusebius Mandyczewski and Felix Weingartner. From 1921 to 1924, he served as Weingartner's assistant at the Vienna Volksoper and as répétiteur and chorus master...

, who called the work "one of the world's great pieces of music" (Associated Press

Associated Press

The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

). Krips commissioned Mechem to write a Second Symphony, which he premiered in 1967 with such success that he repeated it two years later.

Mechem wrote many commissioned choral suites, cantatas and other vocal works during the early 1970s. Seven doctoral dissertations have been written about his choral music. In the 70s he saw a performance of Molière

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...

's classic satire, Tartuffe

Tartuffe

Tartuffe is a comedy by Molière. It is one of his most famous plays.-History:Molière wrote Tartuffe in 1664...

, which inspired him to write his first opera. He wrote his own libretto, as he does for all his operas. Premiered in 1980 by the San Francisco Opera

San Francisco Opera

San Francisco Opera is an American opera company, based in San Francisco, California.It was founded in 1923 by Gaetano Merola and is the second largest opera company in North America...

, Tartuffe was an immediate hit and has since played to audiences in Canada, China, Russia, Austria and Germany, as well as in the USA. Opera Now (London), reviewing the Vienna production, called the work "a delight, a deft, glimmering, witty score" and praised Mechem's "distinctive voice…a genuine flair for theater and an acute understanding of comedy." In 1998 the National Opera Association presented Mechem with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

The success of Tartuffe encouraged Mechem to embark upon his most ambitious work, an opera based on the life of the controversial abolitionist, John Brown

John Brown (abolitionist)

John Brown was an American revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre during which five men were killed, in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas, and made his name in the...

. An essay Mechem wrote for the American Music Center

American Music Center

The American Music Center is a non-profit organization which aims to promote the creating, performing, and enjoying new American music. The organization was founded in 1939 by composers Marion Bauer, Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, Harrison Kerr, Otto Luening, and Quincy Porter.The organization has a...

's online magazine, New Music Box, describes the long evolution of this work. The premiere of John Brown did not take place until 2008, when Lyric Opera Kansas City scored "the sort of magical success that composers and musicians dream of" (Kansas City Star), at which "the crowd leapt to its feet and clapped so long and hard that hands grew sore" (Pitch.com). In the twenty-some years between John Browns inception and premiere, Mechem wrote many other compositions, including two new operas: The Rivals, based upon Sheridan

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan was an Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For thirty-two years he was also a Whig Member of the British House of Commons for Stafford , Westminster and Ilchester...

's classic play of the same name; and Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England...

, on Jane Austen

Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...

's famous novel. "The Rivals" received its professional premiere in September, 2011 by the Skylight Opera Theater, Milwaukee to rave reviews—"A hit, an instant classic" (Third Coast Digest). "Pride and Prejudice" has been tried out in workshops and is presently (2011) being prepared for its premiere. Mechem's Songs of The Slave, a suite from John Brown, had its full premiere in 1994 and has enjoyed more than 80 performances.

In 1990 Mechem made his first of three trips to Russia, then still the Soviet Union. That year he was a guest of honor at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, and was invited back for an "enormously successful" (Pravda

Pravda

Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....

) all-Mechem symphonic concert by the USSR Radio-Television Orchestra in March, 1991—the first time a Soviet orchestra had devoted an entire concert to a living American composer. Five years later he was invited to attend the Russian-language premiere of Tartuffe by the Mussorgsky National Theater for Opera and Ballet in St. Petersburg.
Throughout his career Mechem continued to write a large number of commissioned choral works. In 2007 the American Choral Directors Association

American Choral Directors Association

The American Choral Directors Association , headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, is a non-profit organization with the stated purpose of promoting excellence in the field of choral music...

 celebrated his 50 years of choral publications with a retrospective concert, performed by the Western Illinois University Singers, at its national convention.

From the composer

"As a child I often went to sleep listening to my mother practice the piano. She played at least one recital or concerto every year and we children understood that these were important events. She was a devout Presbyterian, my father an atheist, and they respected each other's beliefs unreservedly. The common spiritual force in our family was music. In my adolescence, my confusions or griefs were assuaged by putting on a record of Ravel, Rachmaninov or Bach

Bạch

Bạch is a Vietnamese surname. The name is transliterated as Bai in Chinese and Baek, in Korean.Bach is the anglicized variation of the surname Bạch.-Notable people with the surname Bạch:* Bạch Liêu...

. Though I do not share my mother's religious beliefs, the great poetry of the Old Testament

Old Testament

The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

 and the great music it has inspired through the centuries touch the deepest part of my being because it connects me with my mother. But it also connects me with my father, who was a fine poet (I have set many of his poems to music), and who loved my mother through music just as all of their children did.

"Is it any wonder then that I should regard music as something almost sacred? I do not mean sacred in a religious sense. I mean it in the sense that one would say truth is sacred, life is sacred. They are not to be mocked. While I love to laugh at hypocrisy, and love humor almost anywhere I find it, I am overly sensitive when I hear what I perceive as the trivialization or brutalization of music, or what was common practice in the 20th century — deliberately making it unintelligible to most music-lovers. This wonderful art has room for endless variety, from lighthearted to tragic, from Western to Eastern and everything in between. Each person has a right to his or her own taste, and I recognize that just as we all come from different backgrounds, we all have different ways of listening.

"And so I readily admit that my own background has conditioned what I look for in a new piece of music, whether my own, or someone else's. I don’t want to find new music "interesting" in a purely intellectual way; I am impatient with novelty or experimentation for their own sake; I am too old to be taken in by trends or jargon. Been there, heard that. I want to love a piece of music, to be delighted by it, to be moved to tears or laughter or in some way taken out of myself. At the very least I must want to hear the piece again, the sooner the better. We composers are speaking a very old language. The new ways in which we speak must be understood by our contemporaries. Otherwise, we are simply spinning our wheels, and music becomes just another plaything, a hobby, an elitist way of putting down the uninitiated. I prefer it to be the magnificent source of joy, consolation, beauty, ingenuity, and inspiration that it has been for generations, and was in my own family."

External links

• http://www.kirkemechem.com/ - complete catalog of Mechem's music; links to reviews.
• http://www.schirmer.com/Default.aspx?TabId=2419&State_2872=2&composerId_2872=1033 – Schirmer's Mechem pages.
• http://www.kcopera.org/pdf/John_Brown_Afterword.pdf - KM article: "Why John Brown?"
• http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5601 - KM article: "John Brown: Evolution of An Opera."

Trivia

Kirke Mechem's name has occasionally been misspelled "Mecham", though the correct spelling is "Mechem."

The composer's middle name is Lewis. His father, the writer and historian, was Kirke Field Mechem (1889–1985). As their middle names were different and as they were in different fields, they rarely used the suffix "Sr." or "Jr." In this article, "Mechem" always refers to the composer.

As a young sports reporter Mechem once interviewed Joe Louis

Joe Louis

Joseph Louis Barrow , better known as Joe Louis, was the world heavyweight boxing champion from 1937 to 1949. He is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time...

. When all he could think of to ask the former heavyweight champion was "How do you like Topeka, Joe?" he decided he was not cut out to be a newspaperman.

Mechem married Donata Coletti, daughter of the Boston sculptor, Joseph Coletti. They have four children.

He was captain of the Stanford tennis team; during the summers he won a number of state championships as a touring player. He claims to be the only person alive who has played tennis with both Bill Tilden

Bill Tilden

William Tatem Tilden II , nicknamed "Big Bill," is often considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. An American tennis player who was the World No. 1 player for seven years, he won 14 Majors including ten Grand Slams and four Pro Slams. Bill Tilden dominated the world of...

 (Mechem was 12) and Billie Jean King

Billie Jean King

Billie Jean King is a former professional tennis player from the United States. She won 12 Grand Slam singles titles, 16 Grand Slam women's doubles titles, and 11 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. King has been an advocate against sexism in sports and society...

 (he was an early mentor of her doubles partner, Rosie Casals, in San Francisco.)

Mechem was editor of the Topeka High School newspaper, The World, and active in drama and sports, but not music. His father also attended Topeka High, and in his twenties was a member of the male quartet that sang for President William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States and later the tenth Chief Justice of the United States...

in a program that dedicated the new Memorial Building in Topeka.

Much of this information was obtained directly from the composer and from examination of his high school yearbooks in the Topeka High Historical Society Room.