A Moment of Spiritual Synchronicity

A Moment of Spiritual Synchronicity** between the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composer Karel Husa (1921-2016) and My Students

** coined by Paul Hindemith

By NAfME Member Joseph Rutkowski

December 15, 2024, marks the eighth anniversary of the passing of Pulitzer Prize-Winning composer Karel Husa. In my final decade of teaching instrumental music, I developed a pattern of eight programs that I revisited every four years with my students to ensure that they would become intimately familiar with eight regions or territories of great composers whom I believe all young performers should know (see footnotes at the end for full list):

• Vienna/Russia
• Prague/American
• Tchaikovsky/Opera
• French/British-Scandinavian

I was fortunate to have personally known Dr. Husa since 1976. For 40 years as a clarinetist in chamber ensembles and orchestras, I had performed many of Husa’s compositions, several times with Husa himself in the audience. At Stuyvesant High School and Great Neck North High School, I regularly assigned our ensembles to study, rehearse, and perform some of the high school age-appropriate works by Karel Husa: Four Little Pieces and Pastorale for String Orchestra; Divertimento and Music for Prague 1968 for Concert Band; and Deux Preludes and Divertimento for chamber ensembles. Every time my students performed one of his pieces, I would send him an audio file of the performance. He would write back his critique (always encouraging). I would share his “review” with my students, and it was as if the great composer was in the auditorium at our concert!

Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1921, Husa was a world-renowned composer and conductor. While composing, conducting, and teaching in the United States at Cornell University, Husa learned that on August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. When I relate this historical incident to my students, I ask them to imagine if they were in a foreign country and learned that the neighborhood where they grew up was invaded by an aggressive army of soldiers and tanks while their family and friends were being in harm’s way.

Devastated, Karel Husa composed the masterwork for concert band Music for Prague 1968, which quickly became a staple in the concert band repertoire and was soon transcribed for symphonic orchestra.

When news of a magnificent and powerful musical composition composed by a Czech citizen reached the new Czech government, it declared that Karel Husa was a traitor, and no Czech citizen could perform or listen to the music of Husa. Realizing that his music would no longer be heard in his homeland, Husa was heartbroken.

However, when the Iron Curtain was torn down in 1989 and many of the Communist nations became democracies (including Czechoslovakia), the newly elected Czech President Václav Havel (also an, author, poet, playwright, and dissident) contacted Karel Husa and personally invited Husa and his family to return to Czechoslovakia so that the composer could conduct the Prague Symphony Orchestra in the Czech premiere of Music for Prague 1968. It was a dream come true for Karel Husa.

In the fall of 2016 when we focused on composers from Prague, my students were preparing with great fervor the final movement of Husa’s Music for Prague 1968 for our Winter Concert. I called Husa to inform him of the upcoming performance, and he expressed joy and anticipation to hear the upcoming performance of his Music for Prague 1968. My students were thrilled that their December 20 performance would be heard and “reviewed” by the composer.

Unfortunately, Husa passed away suddenly a few days before our students’ performance. It was actually a mystical experience that my students and I had the day after Husa passed away.

On Thursday afternoon (December 16), while the students and I were having an after-school sectional on Husa’s Music for Prague on the auditorium stage, I put my cell phone on the music stand to keep track of time. Then I noticed it emitting a text message from my wife: “I just heard from Daniel [our youngest son] that Karel Husa died yesterday!”

I was stunned and stopped conducting. I told my students the shocking news. They were all overwhelmed and did not know what to do. After a minute or two, I instructed them to pack up and meet upstairs in the band room. After they put away their instruments, instead of waving good-bye and going on their way, they just stood motionless at the door waiting for me to say something. I found these words to speak: “I know that we are all saddened that Dr. Husa will not hear our performance of his music and to comment on our performance. But he died knowing that his music was going to be performed by teenagers with a large audience ensuring that his music will live on after he has left us. Let’s go home and practice our parts so that this will be the most awesome performance of Music for Prague 1968 anyone will ever hear.”

This incident calls to mind a term that was used by the German composer Paul Hindemith: “this moment of spiritual synchronicity.”**

John L. Miller-Great Neck North High School Symphonic Band Winter Concert 2016—Student introduction and performance of the final movement of Husa’s Music for Prague 1968

Persevering through their sadness my students brilliantly performed the final movement of Music for Prague 1968 four nights later. I sent the video of the concert to Husa’s family. His wife and children realized instantly that that their father’s music will continue to live through the young people who were touched by their connection with him.

Four years later in December 2020, when our “rotation of territories of great composers” landed on Prague, we were in the worst part of the COVID pandemic. There were basically NO in-person concerts anywhere on Earth. Thanks to the expertise and effort of my older son Ben who was a cinematographer unemployed at the time, he had the time to help me put together a virtual performance of the final two minutes of Music for Prague 1968. Using Garage Band and other technological gadgets, my students made audio files, and we organized a video of what sounded like a full ensemble.

John L. Miller-Great Neck North High School Symphonic Band VIRTUAL Winter Concert 2020

For this virtual concert presentation, I contacted three of the students who were present at the previously mentioned school rehearsal on December 16, 2016. At that time in 2020, they were away at college, most probably attending class remotely. Each one prepared a video message that Ben was able to use as an introduction to the virtual performance of Music for Prague 1968 done by their younger neighbors or siblings.

John L. Miller-Great Neck North High School Symphonic Band VIRTUAL Winter Concert 2020: Former student recollection of the school rehearsal of December 16, 2016

Mindful of the current situations of suffering around our world, I hope this account can elucidate how art, in spite of suffering, helps us find meaning and solace.

Footnotes

Vienna—Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg, Schubert Brahms. Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn

Russia—Shostakovich, Prokovieff, Khatchaturian, Borodin

Prague—Janacek, Husa, Smetana, Dvorak

American—Anderson, Gottschalk, Cohan, Ellington, Gershwin, Armstrong, Hovhaness, Copland, Bernstein, Berlin

Tchaikovsky—an all Tchaikovsky program: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, 1812 Overture, March Slav, Capriccio Italian and Nutcracker

Opera—Rossini, Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Bizet, Strauss, Andrew Lloyd Webber

French—Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Fauré, Franck, Bizet

British/Scandinavian—Vaughan Williams, Sondheim, Britten, Elgar, Holst/Grieg, Nielsen, Sibelius

** While serving in Alsace, Hindemith formed a string quartet and composed quartets of his own. One evening, as they played Debussy’s String Quartet, one of the members of the ensemble was coincidentally informed of Debussy’s death. Hindemith recalled this moment of spiritual synchronicity: “It was as if our playing had been robbed of the breath of life,” he wrote. “But we realized for the first time that music is more than style, technique, and the expression of powerful feelings. Music reached out beyond political boundaries, national hatred, and the horrors of war. On no other occasion have I seen so clearly what direction music must take.”

Program notes by Georgeanne Banker provided for a Monday Evening, February 12, 2024, at 7:30 by the Juilliard Orchestra JoAnn Falletta, Conductor

About the author:

NAfME retired member Joseph Rutkowski taught band and orchestra classes at the John L. Miller-Great Neck North High School on Long Island from 1991 to 2022 and was the orchestra director at Stuyvesant High School in NYC for the eight years prior. He continues to perform as a concert clarinetist in orchestras and chamber ensembles, as well as a jazz pianist with his sons and former students. Joseph is a two-time Presidential Scholar Teacher, a Distinguished Teacher of the Harvard Club of Long Island, the 2015 Long Island Music Hall of Fame Educator of Note, and a three-time GRAMMY Music Educator Award^TM quarterfinalist.

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