How has a small college like Pomona attracted and produced so many important figures in the world of music?

Associate Professor of Music Tom Flaherty

It began again with a low C.

The note--lovingly coaxed by Associate Professor of Music Tom Flaherty from his cello--would have been remarkable if only because it was the first note concert audiences have heard in Little Bridges in more than a year, the hall having undergone a major renovation to make its acoustics even more dramatic. The success of the renovation was clearly evidenced by the purity and richness of the tone as it warmed even the farthest recesses of the hall.

But this C, the opening note of Three Conundrums by Pomona alumnus Gary Wolber '90, gave voice to much more. Here was the mentor playing his student's work; here was another milestone in a long, rich history of composition at Pomona College.

Wolber was Flaherty's first composition student when he joined the Pomona music faculty in 1989. Flaherty and his wife, Cynthia Fogg, who teaches violin and viola at Pomona, commissioned the piece for a concert to showcase the range of new classical music. To that end, a work by one Pomona composer would have been noteworthy. This mid-September evening's repertoire also featured works by Pomona College Professor Emeritus Karl Kohn and Music Department staff member Joseph Brennan. And how's this for an encore: The concert that followed a week later premiered works by Kohn, Flaherty and Pomona gamelan master Nyoman Wenten.

Emeritus Professor of Music and Composer in Residence Karl Kohn

Bringing Pomona composers home to Bridges Hall of Music is a theme of "Bridges Unveiled," the College's fall performance series. "I hadn't been in Little Bridges in 10 years," admits Wolber, who left Pomona to complete his doctorate in music from the University of Minnesota in 1998 and currently lives and composes in Valencia, Calif. He returned to campus to work with Flaherty and Fogg. How did Wolber feel that he should be greeted upon his return with the sound of his own composition? "It was awe-inspiring," he says. "I felt a sense of legacy."

Oh yes, the legacy. Pomona College boasts no fewer than two of the 20th century's most important modern music innovators: electronic music pioneer Vladimir Ussachevsky '35, who created some of the earliest American electronic music compositions and went on to found the seminal Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York and minimalist music icon John Cage, who attended the College from 1928 to 1930. (Cage dropped out, according to an autobiographical statement from 1990, when he went to the library and was shocked to find several students reading the same assigned book. "I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z," he confessed, giving insight into the iconoclastic mind that would compose music based on the randomness of thrown I Ching coins and achieve infamy with 4'33", a piece that calls for a pianist to deliver precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds of scored silence.)

Just one composer of the stature of Cage or Ussachevsky would be a coup for any world-class conservatory, to say nothing of a music department of a liberal arts college that on average graduates no more than two to six music majors a year. And yet from this relatively small pool have also risen composers of the caliber of Susan Blaustein '75, Gene Carl '75, David Chaitkin '59, Morris Haigh '53, Daniel Kingman '49, Douglas Leedy '59, David Noon '68 and John Rahn '66. Kohn was a catalyst behind the College's most definitive statement to date about its composition legacy when, in 1988, Pomona commissioned pieces in honor of its centennial from this impressive list of alumni, as well as from Cage and Ussachevsky. The latter's piece featured yet another noted Pomona College music alumnus, conductor Robert Shaw '38.

All but the Ussachevsky composition were part of a three-day symposium, "Music in Post-Modern America: Celebrating Contradiction and Diversity." Kohn recalls that leading American musicologist Charles Hamm, when invited to speak at one of the symposium's seminars, remarked, "I've often wondered how is it possible that a small, liberal arts college like Pomona should have so many important graduates in the field of music?"

Posed the same question today, particularly as it relates to composers, Kohn's explanation reveals no special magic--just an enduring emphasis upon the fundamentals: "What we aimed to do in the department was to be sure that our graduates were well-prepared. The idea: there was no good musician unless the person was both intellectually as well trained as possible--that meant theory and history--and was as good a performer as is possible. We offered three years of theory, including a semester on 20th-century theory, in a demanding curriculum that was unique at that time. The aim was to produce alumni who could think on their own and use their knowledge to enrich their performances."

David Noon '68, dean of academics and students and chair of the music history department at the Manhattan School of Music, affirms the assertion from Kohn--whom he describes as "a master at imparting his knowledge." Noon firmly believes Pomona's rigorous musical curriculum has helped mold and inspire would-be composers. As a freshman, he came to the college fully expecting to write music. He spent his first three years so steeped in theory and history, however, that he did not seriously touch pen to staff paper until his senior year. The results? Three of Noon's compositions earned him the top two national student composition prizes for 1968. Some 150 compositions later, the accolades still accumulate. Most recently, the Manhattan School presented a four-day festival of his chamber, choral and orchestral works.

"My Pomona experience was a kind of musical, spiritual and intellectual cauldron in which my steel was tempered. There's not a day that goes by that I don't reach back to my past Pomona experience in some way," notes Noon, who says his goal at the Manhattan School of Music is to bring all of the intensity and personal focus of a small college like Pomona to the big city conservatory.

Pomona's Department of Music was never a place to harbor prima donnas, notes Professor of Music Emerita Margery Briggs, who taught voice, piano and music theory in the department from 1943 to 1980. "We were there because of the music, not because of ourselves. We shared opinions as to what music was, what we were supposed to do with it and how we were supposed to teach it. The department was a real meeting of minds. It produced some remarkable students and some remarkable teaching." Pride wells up in Briggs' eyes. "Pomona made the teaching of music worthwhile."

Certainly rigor and comprehensive academics are still hallmarks of Pomona's music program. However, another element--creativity--comes to mind when one watches Tom Flaherty in animated joy as he helps his students elicit thunder cracks and sinuous drum tracks from vintage ARP synthesizers and state-of-the-art computer systems.

The hotbed of this activity, Pomona's Electronic Music Studio, provides the College with a facility with few if any equals in academia. (Notes Flaherty, who came to Pomona after finishing his doctorate at the University of Southern California, "When my colleagues at USC saw what we had here, they were jealous as hell!") Although Pomona's emphasis on electronic composition started in the late 1980s, it came fully into its own in 1990 when the College received a significant bequest to enhance the music studio. And just as musical compositions often establish, develop and return to a theme, it's significant to note the source of that bequest: the estate of Vladimir Ussachevsky.

"I didn't know Ussachevsky, but we had a lot of mutual friends!" says Flaherty, who has carried on the electronic composition tradition that the Pomona alumnus established. "He was a remarkable person and teacher. Many of my teachers studied with him and worked with him. His bequest made a tremendous difference at Pomona."

Flaherty sees a natural connection between Pomona, creativity and the kinds of composers the College has produced. For him, Pomona has established a rich composition legacy and reputation for championing creative and innovative music precisely because it is not a conservatory and therefore does not emphasize technique and performance over history and theory. "I think a lot of conservatories, where high-profile music-making happens, are in fact conservative," Flaherty explains. "That's what the word's about. Pomona is the flipside of a conservatory because there everybody is spending 10 hours a day learning scales on their instruments and here we have people taking biology and psychology and philosophy. Our students are not as focused on the very narrow range of what you can do in music. Often they're more open to a wider range of music itself."

His retired colleague Kohn adds that the liberal arts setting affects his work as a composer as well. "My music, I think, turned out more accessible," he says, "because of balancing what I was interested in as a musician and what I was dealing with as a teacher."

Kohn also believes Pomona's location--near enough to Los Angeles to be on the edge of its scene and yet far enough away to maintain its own identity--plays a role in both the type of composers and the type of compositions that Pomona can claim. It's a feeling Kohn and his wife, pianist and faculty member Margaret Kohn, have shared since their arrival at Pomona. "We felt as the years went on that we were in one of the more exciting parts of the music world."

Excitement for new music certainly has taken root and flourished in Claremont. As community members and veteran concert goers, Kohn, Briggs and Flaherty all mention that the community has long supported Pomona College concerts and come to expect first-rate music and performance, often with an avant-garde or edgy flair. Briggs says it eloquently, "Claremont as a rule has a lot of sophisticated people who really love classical music." Also, the College and Claremont communities have had more than a hand in helping to produce that music. The music faculty and majors combined don't provide nearly the ranks needed to populate all of Pomona's performing groups. Pomona instrumentalists and audience members are, in fact, more likely to be students of the sciences or other humanities than they are of music.

Kohn still marvels at the fact that for years he would attend premieres for new music in New York City, only to discover an audience peppered with familiar faces. "A good proportion were Pomona alumni!" he says. "And they weren't even former music majors!"

Back in Little Bridges, Flaherty and Fogg bring the final notes of Gary Wolber's Third Conundrum to a close. As the applause rises, Flaherty lifts his cello bow and points to the back balcony where Wolber has watched. Several audience members turn and direct their applause toward him. The feeling is one of a musical family extending the heritage to the next generation.

David Scott is director of stewardship and memorial funds at Pomona College.

Photos by Michael Larsen '89 and Tracy Talbert.