Notice of Erez's Passing / Carl Schachter
 

Erez Rapoport, music theorist and teacher, died in Tel Aviv on November 23. He has left a wife, two daughters, his parents, a brother, and a sister. He has also left a large number of friends, colleagues, and students, all of them stunned and devastated by his untimely death. Erez was born in November of 1959 in Netanya, Israel. His early musical education was in Israel: he studied at Tel Aviv University and privately with Menachem Wiesenberg. In 1985 he transferred to the Mannes College of Music in New York, receiving a Bachelor of Music degree in 1987 and a Master of Music degree the following year. Erez was the first graduate student at Mannes to major in theory. He entered the CUNY PhD Program in the fall of 1988. Upon finishing his course work and exams, he returned to Israel to teach. He started serious work on his dissertation—a splendid study of Mendelssohn’s instrumental music—quite a bit later, completing the doctorate in 2004. I first met him during his years at Mannes; he was in my analysis classes there. At CUNY, he worked with me both in classes and in private tutorials; so I got to know him really well. We became close friends; and the thousands of miles that separated us when he moved back to Israel did not weaken our friendship. 

Erez was a wonderfully gifted musician and teacher. He had an extraordinarily keen and sensitive ear, a fantastic musical memory that encompassed huge swatches of the repertory, and a rare combination of clear-headed common sense and creative imagination in his musical ideas. Over the years, I have gotten to know numerous young Israeli musicians who had studied with Erez; some at the Jerusalem Academy; some at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, Tel Aviv University; and some at Lewinsky College. I also got to teach some of them myself, and have never encountered better-prepared students. I was profoundly moved by the unanimous feelings of affection, respect, and admiration for Erez that these former students expressed. All of them indicated that his classes were revelatory with respect to music and transformative with respect to his students’ lives. Several people who attended Erez’s funeral told me that around 300 people had come—far, far more than his family had expected. Many of these were his students, present and former, come to say a last good-bye to their beloved teacher. 

In an age that pays lip service to “authenticity,” Erez stood out as a truly original human being who dared to be himself. He devoted his energies to those things that were most important to him: his family, his friends, his musical scholarship, and his teaching. He had no patience with academic politics, and he was profoundly uninterested in furthering his career. He was singularly modest, unpretentious, and direct in his dealings with people; and in his quiet way he was a thoroughgoing non-conformist. If anything, he carried his modesty too far. He never tried to get his scholarly work published, and he seldom attended professional conferences. As a result, too few of his colleagues throughout the world were aware of the brilliant work he was doing. I hope—and so do many others-- that some of this work will find its way to posthumous publication. Erez was a wonderful friend—loyal, faithful, and helpful. He had a rare capacity for perceiving life’s absurdities and maintaining a consistently benevolent, if somewhat skeptical, stance toward the world. For me and many others, the world is poorer as a result of this tragic loss.