Meet David Kraehenbuehl
Burkhart, Charles
Charles Burkhart MEET DAVID KRAEHENBUEHL A composer worth hearing A concert last spring by the Amor Artis Chamber Choir and Orchestra at Manhattan's Blessed Sacrament Church gave New Yorkers...
...Since his original teaching materials remained with Clark, Kraehenbuehl developed and marketed a second, entirely new piano study program...
...Meanwhile, Kraehenbuehl had to meet the needs of his growing family, which eventually included seven children...
...The 150 such i works he left reveal a fully mature artist and a master of all musical media, tech-' niques, and genres, sacred and secular...
...Some were explicitly liturgical, such ' as The Betrayal, a motet cycle for Tenebrae...
...Ash Wednesday, A Commentary on the Poem by T.S...
...Kathy Grieb of Virginia Theological Seminary are all available free of charge to help churches and worshipping communities observe Bread for the World Sunday on October 24—or another suitable Sunday in October or November...
...Charles Burkhart MEET DAVID KRAEHENBUEHL A composer worth hearing A concert last spring by the Amor Artis Chamber Choir and Orchestra at Manhattan's Blessed Sacrament Church gave New Yorkers the long over-due opportunity to hear a major work—Drumfire: A Cantata against War—by the late American and Catholic composer David Kraehenbuehl...
...To this end, he joined the piano-teaching enterprise of Frances Clark and Louise Goss in Princeton, New Jersey, and with them founded The New School for Music Study...
...The expressiveness and great power of this composer's music deserve to be much better known...
...In 1967, he entered a competition, sponsored by the liturgical publishing firm of J. S. Paluch, in which entrants were asked to compose music for the new English liturgy...
...Nearly all his works were commissioned, and all were performed, many by distinguished artists...
...Because an essential part of the school's mission was teacher training, offered both at the school and at workshops on college campuses throughout the country, Kraehenbuehl spent much time on the road...
...Kraehenbuehl's early music naturally reflects voice is always distinctive...
...As the school's music director, Kraehenbuehl composed a large body of music for The Frances Clark Library for Piano Students, most of which is still in print...
...There he headed the theory department, and, in 1957, founded the Journal of Music Theory (still a major periodical in the field...
...NAME ADDRESS CITY PLEASE PRINT STATE ZIP I I I the influence of Hindemith, but his own tional director) included editing and di-' resting the firm's monthly missalettes and its quarterly guide to liturgical practices, Aids in Ministry...
...These are overlaid with frequently recurring consonance that provides a kind of tonal stability, one immediately accessible to the listener...
...Unfortunately, the many thousands of parishioners using the Paluch materials had no inkling of Kraehenbuehl's concert music...
...He enjoyed an enthusiastic following among the students, and was given tenure in 1959...
...I I Bread for the World Seeking Justice...
...I do not compose to express myself," Kraehenbuehl wrote near the end of his life, "rather to represent human experience as effectively as possible...
...Some were published, but many remain in manuscript...
...The Drumfire cantata was first per-formed by the Princeton Pro Musica under Frances Slade in 1986...
...By 1967, no longer fully able to carry out his ideas under Frances Clark, he left the school to form a competing enterprise, Nation-al Keyboard Arts Associates...
...Born in 1923 in Urbana, Illinois, Kraehenbuehl was given every opportunity for musical and intellectual growth, and by his teens he had developed into a brilliant pianist...
...As in all Kraehenbuehl's serious works, how-ever, its message remains universal...
...He submitted Mass for the People of God, a simple but effective unison setting, with organ, for congregational use...
...In spite of his many talents and activities, Kraehenbuehl never lost sight of his primary mission—the composition I of serious concert music...
...and Seven Archaic Images (1974), an orchestral interpretation of poems by Thomas Merton...
...He died the following year in ' Trempealeau, Wisconsin, where he had moved his family in search of a less ex-' pensive and stressful life...
...See ' www.davidkraehenbuehlsociety.org for ' a complete list of Kraehenbuehl's works, audio clips of seven pieces including ' Drumfire, plus information on the David ' Kraehenbuehl Papers, housed at the Music Library of Yale University...
...Bulletin inserts . . . special prayers for the day . . . and a preaching resource by Dr...
...0-8006-3685-6 120 pp jacketed hc $15.00 DIETRICH BONHOEFFER A Brief Life Captures in a compelling and personal way the religious and political odyssey of one of last century's great religious beacons...
...Charles Burkhart, professor emeritus of the City University of New York, is a pianist and the author of Anthology for Musical Analysis...
...So taken were the Paluch officials by the composition and the composer that they awarded Kraehenbuehl first prize and offered him the post of music editor...
...These attractive pieces, with titles like "Rocking the Boat," "Ramble," "Musing," and a witty volume of Jazz and Blues, grew from his wonderful sense of the mind and imagination of children...
...Mustered out in 1946, Kraehenbuehl applied to Yale, where he won the single remaining place in Hindemith's small group of hand-picked students...
...Free worship 1 resources — to help end hunger T housands of churches across the country celebrate Bread for the World Sunday as an opportunity to renew their commitment to ending hunger in God's world...
...and the Future of Multicultural America Edited by JAMES ECHOLS Seven leading religious voices from the multicultural community assess today's import of King's bold vision...
...Petitions, a setting of the Advent "0" antiphons...
...He wrote and I arranged many pieces of liturgical music, ' and set up several computer programs...
...His nonliturgical works include A Concert of the Mysteries (1960), J commissioned and performed by a groupof string players from the Philadelphia Orchestra...
...This radical about-face sprang from Kraehenbuehl's lifelong conviction that there was a critical need to improve American music education at the grass-roots level...
...A charismatic teacher, Kraehenbuehl first taught at Colorado College, and re-turned to Yale in 1953 as an assistant professor on Hindemith's recommendation...
...Clearly established in a brilliant academic career, to every-one's surprise and chagrin, he suddenly resigned the following year...
...Drum-fire was not composed in response to a particular war, and its performance last spring was not billed as an antiwar event, in spite of its obvious timeliness...
...0-8006-3677-5 90 pp jacketed hc $12.00 FORTRESS PRESS Augsburg Fortress, Publishers 1-800-328-4648 ...rl fortresspress.com Commonweal 2 3 September 10, 2004 III I I I 04XA-CW...
...He did not focus exclusively on letter-perfect performance but at-tempted to enable the child to explore the keyboard, even to compose...
...To request FREE resources: 1-800-82-BREAD (1-800-822-7323) or visit www.bread.org ^ YES, please send me a sample of the free worship bulletin inserts and information about Bread for the World Sunday...
...Kraehenbuehl had become a Catholic while at Yale...
...and In Praise of Marriage: ' A Nuptial Triptych of Psalms (all these dating from 1957...
...Following his conversion to Catholicism, Kraehenbuehl's compositions increasingly reflected a religious inspiration...
...This venture never achieved the financial success it deserved...
...While he was in the Army in World War II, a chance hearing of a recording of Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maier sparked a desire to study with the composer, who was then teaching at Yale...
...It had been commissioned by a friend and former student, Goff Owen Jr., who sent Kraehenbuehl a volume of poems and other writings that his father, Goff Owen Sr., had composed as an infantryman in France during World War I. From these Kraehenbuehl chose several excerpts for his text...
...Eliot for cello and piano (1966...
...The large audience gave the powerful half-hour piece an enthusiastic reception, with many wondering why they had not heard more of this composer's music...
...Fortunately, Kraehenbuehl's complete con-' cert piano works are available on CD I ' (Random Walks, New World Records), superbly performed by Martha Braden, who also published the scores...
...His long association with Paluch (he subsequently be-came managing editor and later educaI HAVE A DREAM Martin Luther King Jr...
...Hindemith would later call him "the most gifted student I ever had...
...This year marks the 30th anniversary of Bread for the World as a Christian citizens' movement...
...The phrases and sections are simple and clear through-out, making it, despite its complex harmonies, easy to grasp and follow...
...Kraehenbuehl eventually scaled back his work at Paluch, serving as an independent consultant until 1996, the same year his National Keyboard Arts ceased operating...
...Because human experience is most dramatically presented in Scripture, many of my compositions set scriptural texts or represent scriptural scenes...
...50 F Street NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20001 Commonweal 2 4 September 10, 2004...
...Ending Hunger...
...Of the work's nine sections, four are brief descriptive pieces composed for orchestra alone that depict in turn the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—oppression, destruction, famine, and death—whereby Kraehenbuehl takes the young soldier's reactions to war and situates them under the eye of eternity...
...Drumfire is full of dissonant sonorities symbolizing the unrelieved tension and disorientation wrought by war...
...At the end, still ' struggling to make ends meet, he was living on Social Security...
Vol. 131 • September 2004 • No. 15
