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Seymour Barab (January 9, 1921 – June 28, 2014) was an American composer of opera, songs and instrumental and chamber music, as well as a cellist, organist and pianist. Seymour Barab biography, SeymourBarab.com He was best known for his fairy tale operas for young audiences, such as Chanticleer and Little Red Riding Hood. He was a longtime member of the Philip Glass Ensemble.
When Barab was thirteen, he started his first musical job as an organist for a church of spiritual healing that his aunt attended.McCrary, interview, p. 196 Barab began to study the cello when he entered Lane Tech High School in Chicago in 1935. Lane Tech offered a four-year music program and required each student to study an orchestral instrument. He later said of his choice: "They happened to need cellos. If they had needed a French horn player, I’d be a French horn player".McCrary, interview, p. 195 Barab also took lessons with the high school orchestra conductor. While at Lane Tech Barab became friends with Ben Weber and George Perle, both of whom would go on to become well known contemporary composers. Together, in 1938, the three founded the New Music Group of Chicago presenting contemporary 20th-century music.Moore, p. 25 They programmed their own compositions in addition to works by other contemporary composers. Most notably, they gave the Chicago premier of Béla Bartók's First String Quartet. Barab became a lifelong champion of contemporary music.Fox, Margalit. "Seymour Barab Dies at 93; Composer of Impish Opera", The New York Times, July 18, 2014 Barab later said of Weber and Perle: "I learned from them. I learned all about music, really. It gave me something to be dedicated to, unplayed music by talented composers. Of course we were all very young then. I just decided that this was what I wanted to do, rather than play the concerto repertoire and the sonata repertoire."Moore, interview, p. 146
During World War II, Barab joined the Navy as musician and was stationed in the Philadelphia Navy Yard where he learned to play clarinet and played in the military band. According to Barab, the main reason he was stationed in the Philadelphia Navy Yard was because Eugene Ormandy recruited him as a cellist so there would be a string orchestra "to play for the Officer’s Lunch".Moore, interview, pp. 148–149 During this time, Barab played with the Philadelphia Orchestra and studied cello with Gregor Piatigorsky, who was teaching at Curtis Institute of Music. Toward the end of the war, Barab married Shirley Gabis, but the marriage ended in an annulment five years later.Moore, p. 27 Barab and his wife moved to New York City, where he played for both the American Broadcasting Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System. He also played in the Felix Galimir String Quartet and helped to found the New Music Quartet of New York. With Noah Greenberg, he later founded the New York Pro Musica Antiqua in which Barab played Viol.Moore, interview, p. 150
Upon his return from Paris, Barab was offered a position as an assistant professor of cello at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.Moore, p. 30 There he met his second wife, Mary Ann, with whom he had two children, Miriam and Jesse, and he also completed one of his first songs cycles, A Child's Garden of Verses.McCrary, p. 23 The recording of this song cycle, sung by Russell Oberlin, sold well and led to Barab receiving a job as a professor of composition at Rutgers University. He took another job at the New England Conservatory of Music starting the Composer's Quartet. He recalled: "Our idea then was to do nothing but contemporary music and especially contemporary music that nobody else would play. I loved that, doing things that just aren't going to be done. That gave me a real purpose in life."McCrary, interview, p. 24 Two more of his songs cycles were published before the end of the 1950s that continued to further his reputation as a composer of tonal music, namely Four Songs and Songs of Perfect Propriety.
In the mid-1950s, Barab began to work on opera composition, collaborating with librettist M. C. Richards on a one-act piece that would eventually become his first opera, Chanticleer.Moore, p. 32 Chanticleer premiered in Aspen, Colorado, on August 4, 1956, was met with favorable reviews, and gained success."Seymour Barab" in Grove David M. Epstein reviewed the premier in Musical America, stating that the piece is a "humorous affair done with a delightful, light touch. Barab has provided a tuneful setting, relatively simple harmonically, but handled with freshness. … With its small cast and charming writing, this should be a popular work with small companies."Epstein, David M. "Aspen Festival Proves Energetic Under Solomon", Musical America, LXXVI.11 1956, p. 9, quoted in McCrary, p 25. Barab came to be known for this simple and tuneful musical style in his compositions throughout his career. In 1957, Barab's second opera, A Game of Chance, with a libretto by E. Manacher, premiered in Rock Island, Illinois, and was also received well.
Barab's opera of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood (1962) is not only his most performed opera, but it is the most often performed opera by any American composer.Moore, p. 33 It paved the way for more of Barab's fairy tale and children's operas for which he is best known. Barab composed the opera for a program called "Young Audiences" that toured around public schools.McCrary, interview, p. 25 For the first time, Barab wrote the libretto himself, providing a prologue in which the singer playing the part of the wolf gets his make up done on stage in front of the audience, allowing the children to see the transformation to reassure the children that the wolf is really just a man in costume.Epstein, Dena J. " Little Red Riding Hood. A Children’s Opera in One Act by Seymour Barab", Notes, Second Series, vol. 23, no. 2, December 1966, JStor In his other fairy tale operas, Barab continued to cut or contextualize the violence, sometimes tweaking the story to emphasize the moral point.
In 1971 Barab divorced Mary Ann, and in 1972, he was married a third time to Margie King. Together they had a daughter, Sarah.Moore, p. 34 Barab continued to compose new works. His full-length opera Phillip Marshall was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Gerald Helund, in a review of Phillip Marshall, commented that Barab's libretto is "packed with power, believability, and character with depth, animation and color. This Civil War 'mainstream mondern' work belongs on the operatic agenda for 1976 with Ward's The Crucible and Floyd's Susannah. American Opera could have three no better representatives."Heglund, Gerald. "Barab Opera Wins Praise", Music Journal, 33 n5, May, 1975, p. 18, quoted in McCrary, p. 25
Barab continued to be an active composer until his death at age 93 in Manhattan, New York City, composing operas, songs, instrumental works, and innovative narrated instrumental works. In 1998 he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Opera Association.
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