Joel Eric Suben


Joel Eric Suben is an American composer and conductor known primarily for his recordings of music by contemporary American and European composers.

Biography

Early Years

Born in the Bronx, Suben was the second of three sons in a middle-class Jewish family of Russian origin. He grew up in the small city of Cortland in Central New York. After showing signs of early musical talent, Suben began studying the trumpet and violin at age 8. He played in school bands and orchestras and sang in choirs throughout his childhood.
At age 10, Suben began transcribing music from phonograph records. By age 13 he was creating arrangements for local dance bands. His music teachers encouraged him to study a number of instruments in the expectation that he would become a music teacher. During summers he undertook formal lessons in percussion, clarinet, and string bass. Although he'd led dance bands as a teenager, his interests gravitated to classical music. At age 14 he auditioned for Syracuse Symphony Orchestra conductor Karl Kritz and was invited to play violin in the Symphony’s newly formed youth orchestra.

Advanced studies

During Suben’s final year of high school he auditioned for Louis Krasner at Syracuse University but declined a scholarship offer from the university in favor of a scholarship to study trumpet at the Eastman School of Music. In deference to his father’s wishes, Suben enrolled in a liberal arts degree program at the nearby University of Rochester and traveled to the Eastman campus for trumpet lessons and theory classes. In his second year, Suben transferred his enrollment entirely to Eastman and concentrated largely on composition and violin studies. He was allowed to declare a major in composition only after he won first prize in 1967 in a nationwide competition for composers. The winning composition, a setting of Psalm 100 for tenor voice and organ, was published by Bellwin-Mills. Suben left Eastman in 1969 with a B.Mus. degree cum laude.
As a full fellowship doctoral student at Brandeis University near Boston, Suben studied composition and theory under Seymour Shifrin, Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Martin Boykan, and studied musical paleontology with Leo Treitler. Increasingly in demand as a conductor of other composers’ works, Suben took a one-year position as orchestra conductor at Northeastern University and held simultaneous music directorships at a local church and synagogue. In March 1973 he led what is believed to be the Boston premiere of Darius Milhaud’s Service Sacré with an enlarged chorus and members of the orchestra of the Opera Company of Boston.
In spring 1973 Suben resigned from all of his directorships, moved to New York City, and began four years of intensive private conducting study with Jacques-Louis Monod. During this time Suben ceased all composing activity and made an intensive study of the standard orchestral and opera repertoire. In 1975 he was admitted to Otmar Suitner’s conductors’ class at the Mozarteum Sommerakademie in Salzburg; at the end of his second summer in Salzburg he was a finalist in the Hans Haring International Competition for Conductors, administered annually by the music division of the Austrian Radio. During the run-up to the final round, the jury summoned Suben back to the podium three times to rehearse the orchestra in Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6.
In August 1976 Witold Rowicki, visiting professor at the Vienna Music Academy, admitted Suben into his conductors’ master class and subsequently invited him to come to Warsaw, where Rowicki was artistic director of the National Philharmonic. Suben won a Fulbright Fellowship and, following a month-long composition residency at the MacDowell Colony, arrived in Warsaw only to discover that Rowicki had retired from the directorship of FN. Suben lived from September 1977 until December 1978 in Katowice, where he was officially a composition student of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki in that city’s music academy. During his tenure in Katowice, Suben organized a series of orchestral performances of contemporary American music; he also conducted the Rybnik Philharmonic Orchestra and the Ogniwo Choir. Suben’s final activity as a student came in 1984 when he was admitted to the master class for conductors given by Sergiu Celibidache at the Curtis Institute of Music.

Academic career

Returning to New York in 1979, Suben resumed teaching part-time at Fordham University and Baruch College. He also completed his doctoral dissertation during this time, one part being the full score to a large composition, the other a theoretical paper. Armed with a Ph.D. from Brandeis, he took a professorship at the University of Richmond, where in the fall of 1980 he organized an orchestral concert honoring American hostages in Iran. This concert attracted considerable media attention.
In 1983 he joined the music faculty of the College of William & Mary, where he remained until 1992 as Director of Orchestras. During this time Suben taught a number of private conducting and composition students. While at W&M, Suben formed a chamber orchestra and created an annual series of the six Brandenburg Concerti of J.S. Bach in the historic Bruton Parish Chapel. He also inaugurated a contemporary music ensemble and an opera workshop at W&M and in November 1989 gave the world premiere of American composer Philip James’s cantata To Cecilia with the William & Mary Orchestra and Chorus.
In 1992 Suben resigned from his position at William & Mary, returned to live permanently in New York, and formed Save The Music, inc. as a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. Apart from a three-year tenure as conductor of the Wellesley Philharmonic during the mid-1990s, Suben has held no further permanent academic positions.

Compositions

Stylistic evolution

Suben’s earliest serious compositions, written while he was still in his teens, reflected a conservative aesthetic and an adherence to the trappings of tonality, prevalent characteristics of new works being composed then at the Eastman School. In his early and mid twenties, Suben’s work acquired a chromatic overlay that reflected the preoccupations of many of his peers and teachers with 12-tone procedures. His works from 1977 onward are fully dodecaphonic. After 1978 his work began to show some influences of Witold Lutosławski and Witold Szalonek, the leading Polish composers of highly coloristic, voluptuous chromatic music of the time, but notably no trace of any influence by his teacher Górecki. By the late 1980s Suben had begun to write functionally tonal music while he continued to turn out highly detailed 12-tone works.

Recent works

After 1993, Suben's compositional output diminished in direct proportion to his growing activity in making recordings. Between 1994 and 2010 his compositional output consists entirely of: television commercial music for Granta Magazine, Breve Sogno for large orchestra, Fantasy-Variations on a Theme of Maria Theresia von Paradis for violin and orchestra, Seven for chorus a cappella, Ciacconetta for viola and orchestra, and Three Images for cello and orchestra.

Awards, prizes, commissions

Suben’s compositions are published by , , , , , and .

Conducting activity

Professional orchestral positions

As of 2010 Suben appears as conductor on more than 50 commercially released recordings, all but one of which he has made since founding in 1992. Among the composers whose works Suben has recorded are Pulitzer Prize winners Leslie Bassett and Roger Sessions; Beth Anderson; F. diArta Angeli; Mary Jeanne Van Appledorn; Elizabeth Austin; ; Jon Bauman; Joseph Bertolozzi; Larry Thomas Bell; Charles R. Berry; Hayes Biggs; ; ; Harold Blumenfeld; Allen Brings; Eleanor Cory; ; ; Emma Lou Diemer; ; Jerzy Fitelberg; Vittorio Furgeri; Steve Heitzeg; Katherine Hoover; Stefania de Kenessey; David Kowalski; Leo Kraft; Philip Lasser; John Melby; Karol Rathaus; Frank Retzel; Marga Richter; Judith Shatin; Max Schubel; Edward Sielicki; William Grant Still; Kile Smith; Walter Ross; ; Marilyn Shrude; ; ; Roberto Toscano; Joelle Wallach; ; Rolf Yttrehus; .

Notable performances and recordings

In March 2009 Suben inaugurated an in-school live performance experience for school-age audiences featuring performances of major works of orchestral repertoire with a handpicked orchestra of New York City freelance musicians.

Discography

Of Suben’s more than 50 commercially released recordings, the following are among the most significant:
In the role of a public music personality during much of his career, Suben has displayed a tendency to engage in polemics. After reading a review of a performance of one of his earliest acknowledged compositions, Suben wrote a letter to the editor protesting the critic’s fixation on the fact that the piece under review was the work of a student. In a newspaper interview about the inauguration of a new chamber music series that he co-founded, Suben evidently used a term that the arts page editor exploited in boldface large type.