Content area
Full Text
Composer who eschewed modernism in favour of a gritty, muscular clarity
The American composer Benjamin Lees had the bad luck to reach his stylistic maturity at a time when contemporary composition was besotted by modernism; more traditional idioms were regarded as passe. But Lees stuck to his guns, writing music he could be proud of, and when the serialist hegemony fell away he had a substantial corpus of solidly crafted works to show for his perseverance, written in a style that married gritty muscularity with formal clarity. The critic Steve Schwartz described it as "a dramatic neoclassicism, free of Stravinskian pastiche, darker than Piston, more direct than Diamond".
Lees always expressed himself directly, in words or notes, and explained: "There are two kinds of composers. One is the intellectual and the other is visceral. I fall into the latter category. If my stomach doesn't tighten at an idea, then it's not the right idea."
Lees was one of several Western composers born in China (among the others are Boris Blacher, John Fernstrm and Jacob Avshalomov): he first saw the light of day on 8 January 1924, in Harbin, Manchuria. When he was 18 months old, his parents, of Russian descent, moved to San Francisco and Americanised their name to Lees.
When his family moved to Los Angeles in 1939 he continued his...