Old Dominion University provost Carol Simpson and President John Broderick present an honorary doctorate to composer John Duffy (photo courtesy of ODU)
By Montague Gammon III
Golden Gloves fighter at fourteen, underwater warrior a little later, Gandhi follower since early adulthood, double Emmy winning composer, conductor and music director; former boxer and World War 2 frogman John Duffy just might be Greater Norfolk’s least well-known, world famous artist.
His compositions for theatre, film, opera, and TV specials, for orchestra, chamber ensemble, band and chorus number over 300. (They include an opera titled Muhammad Ali.)
John‘s personal leaning at a composer is clearly for music integrated with human performance and written text, citing such works’ “theatrical and human reaction,” and their immediacy:
“Theatre is of the moment. [The audience is] hearing and seeing something going on right this moment!”
He says later, “Nothing is more glorious than the human voice.”
Black Water, a 1997 opera with a libretto by Joyce Carol Oates, based on the Chappaquiddick incident, is the first piece John mentions when asked about his compositions.
The Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club commissioned Symphony No. 1: Utah “to draw attention to the endangered, pristine wilderness lands of southern Utah,” he wrote in that work’s liner notes, and also “celebrating a Congressional bill which protects such land,” he adds in person.
He earned his 1979 Emmy award as Music Director and Composer of the television documentary A Talent for Life: Jews of the Italian Renaissance. His score for the PBS documentary series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews brought him his second Emmy five years later. Fifteen ABC Specials and a dozen film documentaries have used his music.
A Time for Remembrance “A Peace Cantata” was a U.S. Government commission marking the 50th anniversary Pearl Harbor. Freedom Overture commemorated the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His 1970 work Winning was a fictionalized look at Nixon’s early foray into dirty politics at the high school level.
He’s done what he terms “organic music” – he doesn’t “call it incidental music” – for Broadway and Off-Broadway, and for plays at Lincoln Center, Guthrie Theatre, Shakespeare Under the Stars, Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre, the American Shakespeare Festival, and lots more.
His list of awards from ASCAP and other serious musical organizations is paragraphs long.
He chatted in person, on the phone and by email before his June 23, 88th birthday, about his work and his life, and about the Virginia Arts Festival’s John Duffy Composers Institute.
There’s a quaver in John’s voice, and a bit of a tremor in his still graceful gestures, but run into him at a concert and he will pick up the thread of yesterday’s conversation, exactly in theme and precisely in phrase, right where it left off. An articulate email bearing further insights might arrive the next day.
Odds are, one will.
He easily recalls who was in the high school band for the first opera he composed when a prep school music teacher (The Eve of Adam; The Stockbridge School; actor and comedian Chevy Chase, playwright and Academy Award winning screenwriter Michael Weller; 1953), and immediately reminds an interviewer, who passingly mentions a half-forgotten bit of theatrical history, just who wrote what.
(And remembers the street in New York where his W.B. Yeats based musical, Horseman Pass By, ran Off-Broadway, “for about a year,” in 1969 (4th Street), as well as details of the favorable reviews of a mid-60’s Long Wharf Theater production of Hamlet, starring Stacy Keach, for which he composed overtures, entre-acts, songs, choruses, dances and a funeral procession, and contributed N.Y. Times lauded directorial ideas.)
He grew up one of 14 children of Irish Catholic immigrants in New York. Like many NYC kids, he says, he loved ball games such as soft ball and “curb ball,” played with a rubber ball and a broom stick. He ran track. “I loved it,” he wrote in one of those post-chat emails, “100 yrd., 220 yrd., and anchor on the relay team. I was fast and somehow the exhilaration of running set my imagination soaring.”
Speed, he says, was likewise his asset as a 14 and 15 year old “6 foot-one, 175 pound light heavyweight” pugilist. He regarded boxing as “an art,” a contest of skill, but he did not like to “beat people up.” (John’s hands rise to the sports familiar dukes-up position when he talks about boxing, perhaps giving people in the Chrysler Hall lobby the idea that this smiling octogenarian is about to attack a nearby grey-beard.)
His musical experience was expanding alongside his sporting activities. Early on, he says, he was “singing in a church, then in a band in grammar school, but I started quite young picking out tunes on the family piano.”
“I started taking formal lessons [but] I taught myself piano because during the depression my family lost everything.” (Including the piano; he practiced on a near-by music store’s instrument.)
“Then when I was about 12 years old I took some drumming and percussion lessons. Then when I was 19-20-21, I was studying counterpoint and harmony with Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland and I was also studying at the Lenox School of Jazz [summer program] headed by John Lewis and from there I began composing scores for shows …”
John had turned 12 in 1938, and 19 in 1945.
The world had gone to war.
“I joined the Navy [at 17] as a wide eyed innocent. My beloved sister [Agnes, one of 8] was an Ensign Navy Nurse. I loved her. I admired her. My older two brothers were in the military, one a paratrooper Captain, one a G2 Intelligence undercover person. I wanted to leave home, I wanted to serve as they served.”
Young John loved to swim in a NYC pool but had “Stayed out of the ocean.”
He swam beneath oceanic surf at Okinawa as a member of the underwater Scouts and Raiders/Combat Intelligence.
Those were the guys who located obstacles before the Underwater Demolition Teams went out to clear the way for landing parties. John served at the very point of the American spearhead in the Pacific war.
He remembers standing a solitary early morning watch over the canvas shrouded bodies of dead shipmates. “If life is so unpredictable, then do what you love and love what you do,” he realized in that somber, quiet early daylight.
So after the War as he devoted himself wholeheartedly to music, leaving no time for competitive sports – “There was too much to learn!” – though at War’s end there had come one more bit of leading-edge service, on a Destroyer Escort converted to minesweeping duties.
Preceding the battleship Missouri as it sailed into Japanese waters for the surrender ceremony, standing at the very bow “with the flying fishes,” John kept watch for mines which ship’s personnel would explode from afar. (He remembers the Captain detonating one with a rifle shot.)
Asked what professional legacy he would chose, John instantly says “That I was able to to serve composers as the founder and director of Meet the Composer,” which he founded in 1974, “and to create programs that encourage the creation of music…”
He calls work that betters the professional landscape for other artists “dear to my heart.”
Meet the Composer, begun with the New York State Council on the Arts, soon “became an independent, national organization dedicated to the idea of the composer as an engaged professional with a central role in our country’s musical culture,” according to the website of New Music USA, of which it became a part in 2011 when it merged with the American Music Center, a 1939 group that Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson and others had founded to foster American music.
“Engaged professional” translates, in part, as someone who gets paid properly, is recognized as a working professional, maintains rights to his or her creations, and who need not supplement composing with other jobs, be they teaching or other musical jobs or factory and watchman work (as Duffy had done).
The decade-old John Duffy Composers Institute, part of the Virginia Arts Festival in association with Old Dominion University, is “dedicated to the inspiration, creation, and performance of new music by living composers … [and exists] to provide gifted young composers the opportunity to create and hear their compositions performed/staged while working alongside senior master composers, singers, pianists and theater professionals” says its website.
The Institute marked its 10th season this year, but John’s ties to Hampton Roads go back to 1963, when he met fellow Greenwich Village resident and publishing house editor Dorothy Rouse-Bottom, whose family owned the majority of the Peninsula’s Daily Press newspaper. Ms. Rouse-Bottom became Editorial Page Editor of the Press in 1983 and served on its board until 1986.
They had married in 1967 and maintained homes in New York and Hampton; “Dory” passed away October of 2011. John’s own health concerns eventually prompted a permanent move to Harbor’s Edge in Norfolk.
(John is currently working on his memoirs with Daily Press performing and food arts writer, blogger and polymath David Nicholson.)
The Composers Institute grew out of conversations between John and Arts Festival Founder and Director Rob Cross, who said in a 2012 Virginian Pilot article, by Teresa Annas, “People don’t realize how much of his composing career he sacrificed to help other composers and to raise awareness for the importance of treating composers as professionals.”
Cross “wanted to have a place where young composers would have the tools to see and hear their work, which I did not have when I was a young composer,” John says.
A few hundred people annually attend performance readings – semi-staged – of musical theater and opera works-in-progress that have been developed by five carefully chosen Composers Institute Fellows during their two week series of workshops, lectures, exercises, rehearsals and other intense interaction with a faculty of distinguished working professionals.
John talks about setting the English language to music so that both the content and the sound of the words remain clear, and reinforced by the music.
“It’s hard learning how to set English so you don’t need a darn subtitle!” he says.
He sings a line from the great Rodgers and Hammerstein 1949 musical South Pacific quietly scathing look at racism, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” to illustrate how thematically and rhythmically important is that one word, “carefully.”
He’s devised a series of lesson plans that, for example, ask the Fellows about what decisions they would make if writing an operatic Hamlet, or if creating a rap version of a Shakespearean soliloquy.
John says that he also gives “a talk [to] encourage them to deal with issues that have to do with social or political matters, and to do with characters in conflict.”
He cites Puccini’s Madame Butterfly: The young Japanese heroine “gives up her traditional religion and ritual to marry an American… a kid of the upper class who is looking for a good time.” All that layered interaction and those social overtones, he points out, “we learn through the opera … through characters onstage in conflict.”
John says that Shakespeare – his favorite exemplar – “lives with the whole body and some contemporary [composers and writers] deal with an itch.”
“That is what I am trying to do – to get these young folks [to do] instead of dealing with an itch.”
“We should talk about composers and writers and the power they hold for good,” he says. “Beethoven had that power. Gershwin, Irving Berlin had that power to make the world a better place.”
One lesson plan from this year institute includes this exhortation:
“To use your composer power you need technique. You need to set texts clearly…You need to
show character though your music…You need heart, soul and intellect.”
“You need to harness your power with clarity and boldness. Pick a worthy subject, rich characters, imagination, invention.”
“Be bold, bold, bold. And bolder… But remember, you must engage your audience with real life struggles, successes and failures that grip us because of our common humanity, our brains, our caring hearts, our love.”
Yet John’s most fervent email was not first about music:
It began, “A question I wish you had asked is: Who inspires you?”
His postscript mentioned “Beethoven, Verdi, Puccini, Franks Loesser, all our fine American theatre writers, our fabulous jazz people and rich, rich folk song legacy.”
What he most wanted to say was, “Gandhi is my inspiration. I admire him more than I can say…He made the world a better place. Most of all he knew there can be no peace unless we learn to live in a shared world.”
So how did the great pacifist of modern times make his entrance onto Duffy’s personal stage?
“Once discharged [from the Navy] I sought knowledge,” he writes in another email. “I met people outside my childhood experiences. I read everything [the Trappist monk and scholar] Thomas Merton wrote. Merton lead me to Gandhi…I came to the conclusion that war is wasteful.”
One of his brothers was wounded during the war. His sister Ariel died of the TB she caught nursing war casualties.
“As Gandhi said, ‘There can be no peace unless we live in a shared world’…”
“‘Sarvodaya: The advancement of all,’ Gandhi’s credo,” he concludes his email.
John mentioned one short quotation when asked about how he might be remembered.
“I did the best with what I had.”
Heavyweight champion Joe Louis said it.
