About Erez / Carl Schachter

 

It's a great honor to be here tonight, and a very sad one. Just a year ago at this time I was in Israel, and came to Tel Aviv several times during that period of two weeks, every time I was in the city it was together with Erez. His absence is such a huge presence for me today. The thought of being here and with him not being here is really almost unbearable. 

 

I was going to start up by saying who I am, but you've heard who I am, so I don't have to do that, and I'll talk a little bit about Erez in the capacity in which I knew him best, first of all as a student and then as a colleague and friend - a very close friend, even though we were geographically very very far apart from each other -thousands of miles of course. 

 

So maybe to say just a few things about his studies. As perhaps you've been told (or know) he began his musical studies here in Tel Aviv, in fact, partly at this institution, and also privately with his beloved teacher and friend Menachem Wiesenberg, and it was Menachem, I think, who suggested to him that he might go to New York and continue his musical education at Mannes College of Music. That is a school in New York, which was the first place in the United States to teach music theory and analysis according to the approach of Heinrich Schenker, the great Viennese theorist who died in 1935. 

 

And, in any case, Erez did come to Mannes. He enrolled as a theory major and completed his undergraduate education in a very-very short time, in two academic years. If I remember... I have the dates written here but they are really not that important, I think he entered in 1985 and graduated in 1987, and the master's program, the graduate program, at Mannes was quite new at that time, and Erez was in fact that first graduate student to major in theory, and without any doubt the best. I think he set a standard that really hasn't been duplicated yet. 

 

After finishing Mannes he applied to... and was enrolled in the City University of New York, or CUNY as it's been called. He, if I remember correctly, actually took one semester off before he entered and came back to Israel - I do not know for what reason - but then did begin at CUNY, and finished his course-work and all the exams quite expeditiously and quickly. 

 

While he was at CUNY he was in a number of my classes and also did several private tutorials with me, one of them, in fact, on Mendelssohn who was a composer that later became a kind of speciality, as you know, of Erez. I really got to know him very very well, you might say both musically and personally, during those years. 

 

What was there about him that made him so special as a music theorist and analyst? First of all he had remarkable ears, real X-ray ears. He could hear through the surface of the music to underlying structure, and always did so in a way that illuminated the surface. He was never particularly interested in structure for its own sake, but for what it might reveal about the beauty of the music, and how it might make the music more meaningful and more enjoyable to the musician. 

 

Any kind of creative work, as I'm sure many of you know, any kind of creative work is filled with frustrations and disappointment and sometimes painful struggles And music analysis, if one takes it as very seriously as Erez did, is not an exception to that. But Erez had a basic playfulness of disposition about him, and that playfulness, which is also a trait shared by all creative people, that there is a sense of play, that is I think is fundamental to creativity, and he never lost that, and I think he was able to communicate it and was also able to show it in the works of the great composers. So though he was very-very serious, he was also full of humor, and... wonderful humor, and humor that really illuminated what he was trying to say and was able to say... so successfully. 

 

After Erez finished his class-work and after he passed all the exams that were necessary he came back to Israel to raise a family and to teach, without having written his dissertation, and it was quite a long time, actually, after he had finished everything else, quite a long time before he began working really seriously at the dissertation, though I know that he was, he had already chosen his topic, which was Mendelssohn, and he was also looking at lots of music, and thinking about it, and making notes about it during this time, but he wasn't actually writing anything. 

 

When the time came for him to write it he did so - I can't say quickly - but quite efficiently. And his wonderful dissertation did not take an inordinate amount of time. Why was it a wonderful dissertation? Well, I'd like to say a few things about that. 

 

First of all, it was very-very beautifully written. I do not know just how much writing Erez has done just prior to that, he was not - and he wrote papers of course in his class work, and they were very good papers - but, I don't think it was something he felt compelled to do if it wasn't required of him and, of course, the dissertation was something, eventually, that was required, but he had a real grace and a beautiful sense of style about his writing, and that's something that he lived, that I feel could have contributed a lot to the world of music. His X-ray ears were very-very much in evidence in his work on Mendelssohn. And I would have to say that there are several things about what he did that are very-very special, and perhaps unique. 

 

One thing is that he created a kind of connection between Schenkerian analysis, which is a kind of depth analysis, and style criticism. There has been a lot of very-very interesting work done on musical style - going back, even, to the Nineteenth century - but most of it is done, really, dealing mainly or even exclusively with the surface of the music, and how that surface is organized. But to get a grasp of a composer's style and do so starting inside the music, from the depths, is something that really is very rare and maybe non-existent and I think that this dissertation shows that... that rare trait in a quite... quite wonderful way. So, that's really one thing to say. 

 

Another thing is that the topic, which was the "Smoothing over of Formal Junctures in Mendelssohn's Instrumental Music". That topic with a forbidding, but actually quite accurate title - the topic seemed rather narrowly focused and, in fact it... the dissertation is in some ways very-very narrowly focused, that is it concentrates on what happens in the boundary between one phrase and the next phrase, or one short section of music and the next short section, or one large section like, say, a Sonata exposition, or development section - how... how Mendelssohn is able both to create divisions and articulations through which the form becomes manifest, but at the same time very-very often smoothing over these divisions so that until, perhaps, the formal division is over and you're past it you realize how just, as if you're on the road and have a turn off and, actually, overshoot the mark. That happens also when listening to music. So this was a very characteristic Mendelssohnian trait in composition, and Erez concentrated on that. 

 

But the miraculous thing in his dissertation is that he uses that to illuminate the entire style of the composer, and uses this narrow topic as a window through which one can gaze at the entire output of this great composer. And that's something, again, that is very-very special - the ability to take one trait, one characteristic, and using that as a foundation branch off and reveal so much more. 

 

When I said that he was dealing with this great composer, that is also something that needs, maybe, to be talked about. Mendelssohn was indeed a very-very great composer - one of a handful of greatest composers of the Nineteenth century. He was recognized as such during his lifetime. In fact, in 1840, if you would go to any knowledgeable musician or music lover in Europe and asked: who is the successor of Beethoven? Who is the great composer following Beethoven? They would not have said Schubert, and they would not have said Schumann. They would probably not have said Chopin. But they would have said Mendelssohn. He was universally recognized - not only in Germany but throughout Europe (very much in Great Britain, in fact) - as a Master during his lifetime. 

 

After Mendelssohn's death, the picture changed, and there was a lot of... What shall one say... kind of contrary ideas about Mendelssohn - some of them because of stylistic changes that had taken place in musical composition during the Nineteenth century, some of them without any question due to anti-Semitism - That is to say, Wagner, who was in some ways envious of some of Mendelssohn's skills as a musician... Wagner wrote, really quite poisonously, about Mendelssohn. And Wagner had an enormous-enormous influence, which persisted well into the Twentieth century. And, I would say, it's been maybe in that last twenty or twenty-five years that Mendelssohn has come again into the light of day, shall we say, and recognized as the genius and the wonderful composer that he was. And, I would have to say that Erez's analysis point out so beautifully, so simply and clearly, the greatness of the music and that's, again, something... It's a real service to Mendelssohn that Erez has done in this dissertation. 

 

I would say, many very good music theorists and analysts sort of show-off their skills in their publications. Erez had very-very little of that. He was very modest and unassuming, and straightforward person. He was not full of his own importance at all. And his writing and his analysis reflect that. 

 

So, this was truly-truly remarkable musician, a truly remarkable human being, a truly remarkable friend. It's a great-great pity that Erez - too modest and too self-abasing - was not interested in a great career in academia, wasn't trying to advance himself professionally and, therefore, stayed away from conferences, did not write articles. All that is, in certain ways, personally very admirable but it's a loss to the world that we don't have any of his work published, and one of the things that a number of his friends are hoping is to get something published. The ideal thing would, of course, be to turn the dissertation into a book and that's the first thing we're trying for, and let us hope that happens. And, assuming that it might happen, that, perhaps, is a positive note, a note of... it's very small, but a grace note of optimism in this terribly-terribly sad, tragic situation. And let's hope that this grace note of optimism really is played, and played soon. 

Thank you all.