The following is the text of an email of mine to a friend:
I think you told me once that you like your work and don’t want to quit.
I hope that’s true.
My Dad was a freelance musician and piano teacher. He was very skilled, was a natural. Loved people. Loved entertaining them and making them happy.
He loved his work; loved being his own boss.
He started working as a musician when he was still in high school.
He used to say all the time, “I never worked a day in my life.” It was a pleasure to hear him say that. I realized that few people could honestly say that they felt that way.
My father tried to “go straight” for a while when he was starting a family. He took a regular job, the only one he ever had, selling advertisements for a radio station. He didn’t stay long.
I never liked working in an office – in fact, I hated it. Hated the office culture and the hours.
I always work better when I am working independently. I am very responsible and will go all out to do a good job. But I hate to be told what to do. I like to set my own standards and work at my own pace.
When I was around 13 and still in junior high school, we had a discussion at the dinner table in our home in Massachusetts one Sunday afternoon that was intellectually stimulating, as was often the case.
My older brother was telling us an anecdote about Mr. Tighe, his English teacher at Canton High School.
A girl student had written a paper for Mr. Tighe in which she used the archaic word yclept, meaning named or called. It was used by Chaucer and Milton.
Mr. Tighe ridiculed her for this. He observed that the simplest and clearest word was always desirable.
Being only 13 and not savvy, I was quite surprised to hear this. I spoke up at the dinner table, and said, “I thought that writers were supposed to use big words.”
“Oh no,” my father, Alan W. Smith — who, besides being a musician, was superbly articulate — said, “you should always use the plainest, simplest word.”
I never forgot this discussion and remark. It was a revelation to me, the start of learning how to write well.
My father, Alan W. Smith, was organist and choir director during the 1950’s and 60’s at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist church in Canton, MA.
I recall with pleasure the choir rehearsals every Thursday evening at our house at 233 Chapman Street in Canton.
Attached is a poem that the choir wrote as an affectionate tribute to my father. I should say that it was written by a choir member, Mrs. Mary Lou Stocker.
Among the choir members mentioned in the poem are Robert (Bob) Stocker, Mary Lou’s husband; John Partridge; and Dot and Pete, whom I don’t recall.
Thursday evening choir practices at our home always ended with a coffee hour, with coffee and refreshments served by my mother. I would be listening to the pleasant music while doing my homework in my bedroom upstairs. I would come down for a moment and say hello to everyone,. They were always so pleasant. I remember those Thursday evenings so fondly,
Alan Hovhaness (then named Alan Vaness Chakmakjian) and my father, Alan W. Smith, both grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts. They both attended Arlington High School; Alan Chakmakjian (Hovhaness) had already graduated by the time my father began high school.
Alan Chakmakjian (Hovhaness) and my father both studied under the same piano teacher in Arlington and had a nodding acquaintance.
Alan Hovhaness was an American composer of Armenian and Scottish descent. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers, with his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies (surviving manuscripts indicate over 70) and 434 opus numbers. The true tally is well over 500 surviving works since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works.
Boston Globe music critic Richard Buell wrote: “Although [Hovhaness] has been stereotyped as a self-consciously Armenian composer … his output assimilates the music of many cultures. What may be most American about all of it is the way it turns its materials into a kind of exoticism. The atmosphere is hushed, reverential, mystical, nostalgic.”
Irving Fine (1914-1962) was my father’s professor for a course in musical composition at Harvard College.
Fine’s Symphony (1962) may be his best work. I find it compelling on repeated listenings. It is not what one would call lush music, but it is totally engaging.
Charles Munch conducted the premier performance by the Boston Symphony Orchetra on March 23, 1962. A second performance of the work by the BSO was given at Tanglewood less than two weeks before Fine’s death in his forties from a heart attack. Fine conducted.
Fine was a member of a mid-twentieth century group of Boston composers who were sometimes called the “Boston Six” or “Boston School.” Other members of the Boston School included Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Harold Shapero.
There are some interesting connections here, from a personal point of view. Besides my father’s having studied under Fine, four composers of the Boston Six — Berger, Bernstein, Fine, and Shapero — all taught at one time or another at Brandeis University, where I was a student in the 1960’s. I had a part time job in the Music Department and used to observe a couple of these professors come and go, but never studied under them.
Besides studying under Fine, my father knew Berger in passing from his Harvard days, when both were students there.
An acquaintance of mine made the following comment in an email to me:
I sense a lot of Copland influence in this music, maybe Gershwin too — and possibly Bernstein, although maybe Bernstein was influenced by these guys (and Fine as well). But more than anything else the first movement sounds like a plagiarized American in Paris.
This writer (the respondent) is badly misinformed. Perhaps they did not listen carefully. There is no hint of Gershwin or An American in Paris. This is a serious (not jaunty) piece; and there is no influence of Gershwin whatsoever, or of jazz. It is particularly disheartening that the respondent uses the word “plagiarized.”
One review of the first performance of Fine’s Symphony — it was a lukewarm review — mentions some traces — or influence — of Stravinsky and Hindemith.
Allison R. First befriended my father, Alan W. Smith, when she was a girl at the Chart Room in Cataumet, Massachusetts, where my father played the piano during summers.
Alan W. Smith at the piano, Grey Gables, Bourne, MA
My father, Alan W. Smith (1917-1989), was a professional musician, piano teacher, and church organist.
I was deeply indebted to my father’s second wife, Janet L. Smith, for making a cassette tape of my father’s impromptu performance available to me. It provides a unique, precious memory of my father doing what he most loved.
My father Alan W. Smith (1917-1989) was a part time organist at the Swift Memorial United Methodist Church in Sagamore Beach, MA, about which church he wrote this hymn.
The church is adjacent to the Cape Cod Canal and was about ten minutes away from my father’s home on Cape Cod.
