Gregory DiPippo informed readers last Friday, September 11, of
the death of Fr. Anthony Cekada. Although I never met Fr. Cekada in person, he and I would
exchange emails from time to time on musical matters. Readers are no doubt
aware that he was a great lover of sacred music in all its varieties. At one
point, when we were discussing easy choral Masses in Latin with organ
accompaniment, he offered to send me copies of a number of Masses for two- and
three-voices, which I gladly accepted. He ended up sending me a considerable
number of them, which I still have on my bookshelf.
On June 15, 2016, Fr. Cekada sent the following article, with illustrations,
to his email list. I knew that Father was a composer of modest and useful
sacred music, but I had not realized the extent of his musical
training until this charming article and its illustrations. I thought it would
be a fitting way to remember him, in spite of the fact that we obviously had
profound disagreements in matters of ecclesiology. The article was prefaced
with a note.
"Dear Fathers, Seminarians, Church Musicians, Teachers and Friends,
"During the past week or so, I’ve had a lot of correspondence with musicians,
including some professionals who live by this glorious art. In one exchange, I
told the unusual story of my own musical education in my early and mid-teens.
It took place over two intense years, exactly a half century ago. The
education took me from being an untrained but eager musical ignoramus at 14 to
being the accomplished and technically adept orchestral composer of a major
work at 16. The credit for my transformation belongs to one amazing man:
Michael P. Hammond. The story of what he did and its final outcome is a
testament to the lasting and profound change that one good teacher can make in
the life of a willing student.
"Unfortunately, Mr. Hammond soon departed for another teaching post. His
successors spurned the traditional principles he had taught me and insisted we
composed noisy, irrational junk. I quit composition in disgust, turned to the
organ, put all my works away, and, for a half century, gave little thought to
my teenage composing days. But very recently, you’ll see, I went back for a
look at the music I had composed. It was only with fifty years perspective
that I could see in it the miracle that Michael Hammond worked on the teenage
Anthony Cekada. I thank God for Michael Hammond — and all great teachers like
him!"
“What One Good Teacher Can Do: A Musical Reminiscence”
Fr. Anthony Cekada†
Michael Hammond was not a composer, but he was an amazing man and musician.
When I met him, he was about 30, and had just been appointed director of the
Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and of the Milwaukee Civic Orchestra.
I studied with him for a mere two years, 1966-1968, when I was 15–17. To me,
Mr. Hammond was a spectacular speeding comet, shedding bright light on all
corners of the musical universe and leading me on an exhilarating, non-stop
journey towards excellence in the composer’s craft.
By that time, Mr. Hammond was already the complete Renaissance man — a
polymath in classics, philosophy, sociology and medicine; Rhodes scholar;
student at Oriel College; expert in medieval polyphony; instructor in
physiology and anatomy at the University of Wisconsin; researcher in
neuroanatomy; student of Indian music and the sitar under Ravi Shankar, and,
incredibly, a speaker of the Menominee American Indian language! After he left
the Conservatory, he would go on to become founding dean of the music
department at SUNY-Purchase; Assistant Conductor of the American Symphony
Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Norman Dessoff Choirs;
dean of music at Rice University; president of Rice University, and in 2001,
be appointed by President Bush as the eighth chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts.
When I began studying with Mr. Hammond, my only previous musical training
consisted of Catholic grade school music classes, singing the daily High Mass
with the rest of the children and going to concerts, courtesy of the wealthy
lady who employed my father as her chauffeur. In grade school, I desperately
wanted to play the piano, but it was physically impossible to get one into our
tiny apartment.
Fortunately, when I started high school in 1965 at age 14, I finally got
access to pianos, and better yet, to practice organs. I found a nun to teach
me organ.
I promptly composed my first piece, an organ march to be played after Mass.
(Ex. 1).
At the same time, I began trying to compose sacred choral music by studying
scores of the old masters and trying to imitate them. The post-Vatican II
liturgical changes has just been introduced, and the new music that came with
it revolted me. Everyone else might produce insipid musical junk for Mass, but
not the teenage Anthony Cekada! He would learn how to be a composer and then
write
real sacred music!
My father’s employer, Paula Uihlein, was a great patroness of the arts in
Milwaukee, and when she got wind of this, she arranged for me to meet Mr.
Hammond, who had just taken up his post as the conservatory director.
I brought Mr. Hammond all my compositions, and told him what I aspired to do:
compose good, traditional sacred music. He said that what I’d shown him was
very promising and showed that I had a real ear for the older styles, but that
I needed to learn all the correct rules of technique.
The program Mr. Hammond laid out for me was this. Two years of piano training,
then organ. He would personally tutor me in counterpoint, in those those
principles of composition and theory where he thought I needed the most help,
and in introductory orchestration. These lessons, he said, I could immediately
apply to my own compositions — a point that he probably figured would keep my
interest fired up.
When I graduated from high school, Mr. Hammond added, I should then coordinate
taking the formal composition curriculum at the Conservatory with my theology
courses at the diocesan seminary. This would ensure that in the long run there
would be no gaps in my formal training.
So each week, I spent a very intense hour or so in Michael Hammond’s office,
correcting exercises, learning principles and making practical applications to
my compositions-in-progress. He was an astoundingly lucid teacher and an
exemplary mentor.
To begin our sessions, Mr. Hammond had me select any score from the library or
his office that interested me, and pick a page or two in it. We’d then go
through my selection to understand what was going on musically and why. At
first, I picked Bach cantatas or Mozart symphonies, and I was amazed at his
ability to do on-the-spot piano reductions of the dozen instrumental staves
[stacked lines of music showing the note for each individual instrument],
often in different keys. Little stinker that I was, I later started to test
him by picking monster scores from Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
None of it fazed him in the least — instant reduction, then ”Here’s the
musical context... Now look at this, this and this…”
After two years of this, alas, Mr. Hammond was off to Purchase and to
Stokowski. But what practical effect, if any, did his tutoring have on the
musical compositions of Anthony Cekada, 16-year-old aspiring composer?
Up until a few days ago, I couldn’t have given you a clear answer. Sure, Mr.
Hammond’s tutoring had undoubtedly improved my composing, but I couldn’t have
told you much about how or why. In 1970, I sealed up my completed scores in
two envelopes, and never looked at them again.
But my discussion with a young musician on Monday piqued my curiosity, so I
opened the envelopes and pulled out the scores. What I found after 45 years absolutely astounded me. I had come to Michael
Hammond as a musical ignoramus with grade-school music training, but full of
teenage eagerness to get things right. After just two years with him, here is
some of what he got me to produce:
A homophonic Ave Maria imitating Palestrina. (Dec. 1966, age 15) With few
exceptions, it followed correct voice leading and harmonization rules, but
with little touches of the modern or the unexpected here and there. It showed
a nice attention to subtle dynamics. A parish choir performed it. (Ex. 2)
A Renaissance-style Kyrie. (Prob Fall 1966, age 15). Scored for SSTB a
cappella in mode I. The two soprano parts were an exercise in how to handle
voice lines that overlap.
Motet Acclamationes Sanctae Virgini. (May 1968, age 16). A cappella with two
choruses alternating (SSAA, TTBB), possibly imitating Cristobal Morales.
Observes all the correct Renaissance rules. Treats successive sections of the
text (
Tota Pulchra es Maria) in a variety of textures. Eighty bars long! Alas,
it was never performed. (Ex. 3)
A baroque pastiche on Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland (March 1969, age 17). Scored
for four-part chorus, continuo and a challenging violin obliggato. (Ex. 4)
“Mass of Praise and Glory” (begun early 1967, age 15; completed January 1968,
age 16) (Ex 5)
