January 15: Elie Siegmeister

Music composer, educator and writer Elie Siegmeister was born in Harlem on this date in 1909. The creator of nine operas and nine symphonies, as well as ballets, chamber works, and over 100 songs, Siegmeister was also the inspiring teacher of numerous composers at Hofstra University, where he was composer-in-residence for a decade and organized and conducted the Hofstra Symphony. According to the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, Siegmeister is “best remembered for his lifelong mission to forge a distinctive American compositional idiom consistent with his unwavering political and social commitment. . . . Siegmeister remained throughout his life an emblem of artistic social consciousness and an advocate of art and serious concert music for the common folk.” He also composed for Hollywood, helped to organize the American Ballad Singers and the American Composers Alliance, and produced several important books on music, including Treasury of American Song (with Olin Downs) and The Music Lover’s Handbook. In 1978, he organized the Kennedy Center’s National Black Music competition. Siegmeister’s work and reputation have been actively preserved by one of his students, composer Leonard Lehrman, through the Elie Siegmeister Society, founded posthumously in 1999.

“The 1930s were a great big time of discovery or rediscovery, or renaissance . . . of the American folk tradition . . . when a certain number of musicians, or even non-musicians, began to be aware: ‘We’re got this great background of wonderful stuff out there. It’s exciting and we ought to know about it! And it’s our own!’ ”—Elie Siegmeister