Notes on the Program
Mitch Leigh b. 1928
Mel Powell 1923–1998
Mitch Leigh was born in 1928 in Brooklyn. His parents, who had arrived in New York in 1921, made it a priority for him to take clarinet lessons. After attending the High School of Music and Art, in 1946 he joined the army in order to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. While laid up in Walter Reed Army Hospital with a baseball injury, he heard Hindemith on the radio and wrote to him at Yale; the next fall, he enrolled. Leigh earned his bachelor’s degree in 1951 and his master’s in 1952.
Mel Powell’s musical life was marked by sharp shifts. As a young boy, a baseball injury turned his focus toward music. He then wanted to be a concert pianist, until his older brother introduced him to jazz. By the age of fourteen, Powell was playing jazz professionally around New York City, and in 1941 he started working as a pianist and arranger for Benny Goodman. He also played jazz in Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band 1942– 1945, then after the war in New York and Los Angeles. In the 1940s he began to experiment with composing, including a year writing for film in Los Angeles.
Leigh said in an interview that Hindemith “could write music for everything… Gebrauchsmusik [‘music for use’]. After working with him, when I left Yale I could write anything.” And he did: after graduating, Leigh worked as a composer/ conductor for Warner Brothers, and in 1954 he started writing radio and television commercials. Soon he founded Music Makers, Inc., a commercial production house that created jingles for companies including Revlon, Sara Lee, and American Airlines. The agency won major awards in the advertising industry. Leigh is best known for the musical Man of La Mancha, with book by Dale Wasserman and lyrics by Joe Darion. Based on Cervantes’s The Adventures of Don Quixote, the musical opened on Broadway in 1965 and won two Tony Awards. “The Impossible Dream (The Quest),” the musical’s iconic song, won the Contemporary Classics Award from the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.
In 1949, Powell stepped out of the jazz world and onto the Yale campus to study with Hindemith. Powell’s early works, under Hindemith’s influence, were neoclassical in style. In the 1950s, he started to incorporate atonal elements into his compositional process. When Hindemith heard Powell’s first twelve-tone work, he reportedly said, “So, you’ve gone over to the other side.” By 1958, Powell was writing exclusively structuralist serial music, with complex relationships between not only pitches and intervals but temporal structures and other compositional elements. After graduating from Yale in 1952, Powell taught composition at Mannes and Queens Colleges. Five years later, when Hindemith left the United States, Powell became the chair of composition at the Yale School of Music and the director of the fledgling electronic music studio. Powell left Yale in 1969 to help start the new California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for the rest of his career. He wrote his intricately structured Woodwind Quintet in 1985 on commission from the Sierra Wind Quintet. In 1990, Powell won the Pulitzer Prize for his double piano concerto Duplicates.