Richard St. Clair

Richard Collins St. Clair (born September 21, 1946) is an American composer, pedagogue, poet and pianist.

Life History and Musical Career

According to birth records, Richard St. Clair is descended from Norse raiders settling in Normandy in the 9th century CE; adopting the surname St. Clair or Sinclair, his early Scottish ancestors include William "The Seemly Le Blond" de St. Clair (1028-1090), Baron of Rosslyn (Scotland) born in St. Claire Sur Elle, France, a compatriot of William the Conqueror. His family also has Scots-Irish ancestry. On his mother's side his Norwegian-Swedish roots trace back as far as the 9th century CE according to birth records. In the 17th c. St. Clairs (or Sinclairs) emigrated from the British Isles to New England as part of the early colonization of North America. St. Clair's maternal ancestors emigrated from Norway and Sweden to the American Upper Midwest (in particular, Minnesota) in the latter part of the 19th century along with hundreds of thousands of other Scandinavians who settled there at that time. So many Norwegian immigrants settled in the Upper Midwest that it is locally referred to as "Little Norway."

St. Clair was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. The following year his family moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota, a larger city with much greater musical and cultural opportunities than his birthplace. The musical environs of Grand Forks served as the foundation for his life in music. The city boasted its own symphony orchestra, a major university with an active music department, a concert series featuring prominent soloists, and a school system that emphasized music education. For years he sang in both the Centralian concert chorus of his high school (Grand Forks Central High School) and the sanctuary choir of the church (First Presbyterian) which he attended as a child and adolescent. He also sang in the Choral Union, a collaboration between the University of North Dakota and the Grand Forks community. It was these singing experiences that imbued him with a love of choral music which has carried him throughout his musical life, with dozens of choral compositions to his credit.

Music ran through his family. His maternal great-grandfather Ludvig Svendsen Bogen played in the Norwegian King's Band and his grandfather Sven Fredrik Bogen was a band conductor who played and taught many different instruments; his maternal grandmother was a piano teacher. His paternal grandmother was a gifted pianist. His father, Foster York St. Clair (1905–1994) – a Harvard-educated English literature scholar, university professor and poet – and his mother, Elna Ruth Bogen St. Clair (1912–1974) – a business college teacher – were both amateur musicians and classical music-lovers. St. Clair from a very early age fell in love with the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, which were played in his home on fragile 78-rpm records. At age 4 he began taking piano lessons. By age 16 he was starting to write music, mainly for chorus and organ, inspired by Gustav Holst, Flor Peeters and Paul Hindemith.

A turning point in his musical life came in 1963 when he attended on scholarship the International Music Camp in the International Peace Garden on the North Dakota-Canada border. Amidst the intense musical environment, his performances at the piano, together with his then piano teacher Paul Lundquist, were noticed by Professor Earnest Harris, head of the piano department at Moorhead State College (later renamed Minnesota State University Moorhead). Harris, steeped in the pedagogic tradition of Theodor Leschetizky and Carl Czerny, gave him a full scholarship to study piano, culminating in his brilliant senior solo recital in Grand Forks the following spring, playing the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

In 1970 St. Clair made a solo piano appearance in a recital of his own music in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Reviewer Ned Brown made the following observations:

We admired St. Cair's expansive genius, his dynamic keyboard skill and his personal modesty. At 24, Richard St. Clair is firmly launched on a musical career which offers great possibilities.^[1]

St. Clair, following in his father's footsteps, began his studies at Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts) where in 1969 he earned his Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) with honors in music composition, the first of many Harvard students to write a musical work in lieu of a thesis. In graduate school at Harvard he went on to earn his Master of Arts (A.M.) in 1973 and his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in 1978, both degrees in music composition. During his student years he was awarded several prizes for his compositions. At Harvard he studied composition with Roger Sessions, Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, and David Del Tredici. He studied piano privately with Paul Lundquist, Earnest Harris, and Leonard Shure. As a graduate student he was persuaded by a fellow student at Harvard to study piano with Margaret Chaloff in Boston. After a few lessons it became evident to him that she was grooming him for a career as a concert pianist, against which St. Clair rebelled and decided to continue his aspirations as a composer. He made his debut as a composer with his performance of his avant-garde Piano Piece no. 1 at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1967 as an invitee of his teacher, Leon Kirchner; there he was encouraged by Director Rudolf Serkin to continue to pursue a career in composition. Both Shure and Serkin discouraged St. Clair from pursuing his piano studies, though St. Clair occasionally performed his own piano compositions in concert. Although his student years were turbulent, he emerged as a successful composer of broad stylistic tastes. In the field of religious music, St. Clair has distinguished himself as a composer of choral Buddhist music. His hour-long Dharma Chant: A Buddhist Oratorio in Three Parts for a Capella Chorus is a contrapuntal tour-de-force which sets ancient Theravada and Mahayana (Pure Land) Buddhist texts in a mixture of modal/tonal/pandiatonic Western styles.

Difficult to describe but generally in the broad category of Neoromanticism (music), St. Clair's music runs the gamut of pure tonality to avant-garde atonality. His early Piano Pieces no. 1 and no.2 are intensely atonal and show the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Since then, however, he has turned to a more approachable style following the tradition of 20th-century masters including Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók and Arnold Schoenberg, the latter who taught his teachers Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner. His Love-Canzonettes and other works for chorus and his many ragtime works for piano are completely tonal and classically conceived, as is his Symphony in A and his chamber opera, Taema. His string quartets and much of his other music including his Concertino for Wind Band are tonally more challenging and structurally freer. For instance, his First String Quartet is structured freely around the octatonic scale, while his Second String Quartet employs a twelve-tone row.

Of St. Clair's The Lamentations of Shinran for Soprano, Tenor and String Quartet, Boston Phoenix music reviewer Lloyd Schwartz wrote in February 2000:

St. Clair has created a fascinating sound world, both charged and atmospheric. His is a stirring and original voice.^[2]

In 1969 and 1970 he taught piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston (Massachusetts), and from 1973 to 1977 he taught music history and composition at his alma mater, Harvard University. He also served on the music faculty of Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Academy (Andover). Since the late 1970s he has lived a mainly reclusive life, occasionally emerging to present his compositions in concert. In the 1990s after a personal crisis, he abandoned his Christian beliefs and subsequently converted to Buddhism. He identifies with the Jodo Shinshu (Shin Buddhist) religious faith.

Compositions

References

Bibliography

• Wolfgang Suppan, Armin Suppan: Das Neue Lexikon des Blasmusikwesens, 4. Auflage, Freiburg-Tiengen, Blasmusikverlag Schulz GmbH, 1994, ISBN 3-923058-07-1
• Paul E. Bierley, William H. Rehrig: The heritage encyclopedia of band music : composers and their music, Westerville, Ohio: Integrity Press, 1991, ISBN 0-918048-08-7
• E. Ruth Anderson: Contemporary American composers – A biographical dictionary, Second edition, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982, 578 p., ISBN 978-0-8161-8223-7
• E. Ruth Anderson: Contemporary American composers – A biographical dictionary, 1st ed., Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976, 513 p., ISBN 0-8161-1117-0
• Who's Who in America 2009, 63rd ed., Marquis Who's Who, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8379-7017-2

External links

• Buddhist Websites
• Free scores by Richard St. Clair at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)