IN MEMORIAM

Jorge Mario Liderman

Professor of Music

UC Berkeley

1957 – 2008

Jorge Liderman, renowned composer and professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, died on February 3, 2008, in El Cerrito, California.   Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 16, 1957, Liderman played classical guitar as a child, and began his formal music training at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, where he studied composition with Mark Kopitman. After receiving his B.M. degree with honors there in 1983, he continued his education at the University of Chicago, where he studied composition with Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran, earning the M.A. in 1986 and the Ph.D in 1988. He joined the Department of Music at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1989.   Liderman used Argentine and Jewish elements in his music, and described his musical grandparents as Stravinsky and Bartók, and later, György Ligeti and Steve Reich. His music is characterized by both rhythmic drive and lyricism. Although it can be challenging to perform, his music is unusually accessible to the listener, who may find it to be imbued with elements of joy and exuberance. In his own words, “I think contemporary music has been divorced from the audience for quite a long time. We’ve been living in a ghetto of composers writing music for other composers.” By contrast, Liderman endeavored, he said, “to write music that is visceral, that can move you not just intellectually but also emotionally and physically. I think something has to grab you on a subconscious level in the music. In my case, it’s usually the music’s rhythm.”   His works have been commissioned and performed by the London Sinfonietta, the American Composers Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Tanglewood Orchestra, Radio France, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Arditti String Quartet, Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Boston Musica Viva, Milan Divertimento Ensemble, Chicago Pro Musica, Camerata de las Americas, Duo 46, Eastman Musica Nova, Earplay, Sequitur, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, as well as by individual artists Oliver Knussen, Diego Masson, Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Tanenbaum, Carla Kilhstedt, and Gloria Cheng. Liderman’s music has been featured at prestigious new music festivals such as Darmstadt, Nuova Consonanza, Stuttgart’s Neue Music, Semaines Musicales Internationales d’Orléans, Mexico’s Foro Internacional, London’s Viva, Osaka’s Expo 90, the International Rostrum of Composers, Paris, and Holland’s Proms, among others, and his works are recorded on CRI, Cadenza, ERM, Albany, and Bridge Records.   Liderman’s opera, Antigone Furiosa, was written at the request of Hans Werner Henze. A setting of playwright Griselda Gambaro’s surrealistic version of Sophocles’ Antigona, it received the 1992 BMW International Music Theater Prize in conjunction with the Third Munich Biennale, and was the subject of a German television documentary.   In 2002, Liderman composed an hour-long, three-part cantata, Song of Songs, using Chana and Ariel Bloch’s new English translation of the famous love poem in the Hebrew Bible. The piece was premiered by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus at Cal Performances. He said of this work, “The passionate intensity of the Blochs’ translation, its richly sonorous language and strong supple rhythms, clearly invited a musical setting.” He was struck “by the joy, warmth and color of the Song—the passion of young love, the exhilaration of a first sexual encounter, the blossoms, spices and bird songs of springtime. These impressions translated themselves almost immediately into song…”   In 2007, San Francisco’s New Century Chamber Orchestra performed the world premiere of Liderman’s Rolling Springs; the violin-guitar Duo 46 presented Aires de Sefarad at the Jewish Music Festival; and Cal Performances at UC Berkeley presented a 50th birthday concert of Liderman’s chamber works, performed by Sonia Rubinsky, piano; Cuarteto Latinoamericano; David Tanenbaum, guitar; and the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players. A day after his death, his chamber concerto Furthermore, written for violinist Carla Kihlstedt and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, was premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.   Liderman received honors and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim, Fromm, Harper, and Gaudeamus foundations, the University of California President’s Fellowship, the MacDowell Colony, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Argentine Tribune of Composers.   Liderman mentored a generation of composers who passed through UC Berkeley’s music department. Of his teaching, he said: “The challenge of a composition teacher is to try to understand what the student is trying to do and help them to do it in the best possible way—sometimes even making them aware of what they are trying to do in the first place.” Liderman’s office door was literally always open, and between classes or composition lessons he composed constantly. In addition to his composition classes, Liderman taught harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and contemporary music.   Liderman served on the Cal Performances Advisory Board, the UC Intercampus Arts Committee, the University Athletics Board Committee, and the Committee on International Education. Within the music department, he organized composition colloquia, planned the visit of composer and Regents’ Lecturer Steve Reich to Berkeley, and served as chair of the Bloch Professor committee.   An avid bicyclist, Liderman was always in top physical condition. He enjoyed cooking and entertaining, art, travel, and international affairs. He was a kind soul, always available for a cup of coffee and an encouraging word.   Liderman is survived by his wife, Mimi Wolff, of Richmond, California, his sister, Claudia Liderman, and his mother, Sarah Liderman, both of Buenos Aires.     Christy Dana

source : the university of california

Composer Liderman’s colleagues, students mourn

BERKELEY

By Joshua Kosman

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Colleagues and students of composer Jorge Liderman struggled Monday to come to grips with the news of his death in an apparent suicide Sunday, just one day before the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players were to premiere his “Furthermore,” a new chamber concerto for violin.

“I’m still kind of reeling,” said guitarist David Tanenbaum, who collaborated with Liderman on four chamber works. “He had project after project going on.”

“Jorge’s career has just been on an upward swing,” said composer Edmund Campion, who taught with Liderman in the music department at UC Berkeley. “He’s been writing music and getting premieres and getting noticed all over.”

Liderman, 50, died after being struck by a train in El Cerrito Plaza BART station at 9:42 a.m. Sunday. BART spokesmanLinton Johnson said the incident remains under investigation.

In a statement issued through a spokesman, Liderman’s widow, Mimi Wolff, said, “Jorge was a wonderful, kind and loving man, a brilliant composer and musician. He had an extraordinary talent for expressing himself through his music. He was a very private person, and everything he wanted to communicate to the public he did through his music.”

Whatever pain may have afflicted him, Liderman’s friends and colleagues said, he kept to himself.

“We knew that Jorge had problems that he’d been fighting for as long as we knew him,” said Campion. “But he never shared them and he never complained about them. He kept his composure.”

Instead, he continued to compose prolifically, including three string quartets, several large orchestral works and the “Aires de Sfarad,” a large compendium of traditional Sephardic songs arranged for violin and guitar. He was also a dedicated teacher to a generation of UC Berkeley students.

“He was a perceptive and caring composition teacher,” said composer Loretta Notareschi, who earned her doctorate in music last year. “His comments about my music were always on the mark, and he wasn’t afraid to take me to task when I wasn’t writing the best music I could.”

Michael Zbyszynski studied with Liderman in the 1990s and is now affiliated with the department’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.

“To this day, when I have a draft of a piece I’m working on, I imagine what it would be like bringing it to him for a lesson,” he said. “A lot of composers have an imaginary committee, and for me, he’s the guy I conjure up when I’m looking for expert advice.”

At Monday night’s concert, pianist Jacqueline Chew, who had played and recorded a number of Liderman’s pieces, recalled her late colleague.

“His music was very challenging and rewarding to play,” she said. “I felt he was always ambitious, always eager to try new things.”

The mood was grim at the Berkeley music department office Monday, with some students and staffers too distraught to comment. Liderman’s is the latest in a series of deaths to strike this small composition faculty, beginning last March with the death at 57 of Professor John Thow, and continuing in December with the death of Professor Emeritus Andrew Imbrie.

“Jorge was a good and attentive teacher, with his door open for hours on end to encourage students to come in,” said ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade, the department chair. “He very much enjoyed teaching the craft of composition.”

Liderman’s music was widely performed and recorded, both locally – by such groups as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the New Century Chamber Orchestra – and internationally by the Mexican ensemble Cuarteto Latinoamericano, a long-standing champion of his music.

Especially over the last decade, his work was notable for its rhythmic vitality, melodic fluency and bright colors. That was a legacy of both his Argentine upbringing – particularly fascination with the tango – and his Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

“The music bustled along with an incredible sense of direction and forward energy,” Tanenbaum said. “And I loved that he didn’t make a big thing out of beginnings and endings. He just welcomed you into his musical world.”

Composer Steve Reich, whom Liderman often cited as an important influence, said, “Jorge Liderman was a skilled composer and a delightful human being. It’s very hard for me to grasp that he isn’t here now. I will miss him.”

Liderman was born in Buenos Aires in 1957, the grandson of European immigrants. He studied electronics in high school, but soon found himself drawn to music, especially after a formative encounter with the music of tango composer Astor Piazzolla.

He attended college in Jerusalem, then came to the United States to earn a doctorate in composition at the University of Chicago. He joined the UC faculty immediately afterward.

In addition to his wife, of El Cerrito, he is survived by his mother, Sarah, and his sister, Claudia, both of Buenos Aires. Plans for services are pending.

Jorge Liderman, award-winning composer and music professor, dies at age 50

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations | 06 February 2008

BERKELEY – Jorge Mario Liderman, a distinguished composer and a University of California, Berkeley, music professor, died suddenly Sunday (Feb. 3). He was 50.