Meet David Kraehenbuehl: a composer worth hearing.

A concert last spring by the Amor Artis Chamber Choir and Orchestra at Manhattan's Blessed Sacrament Church gave New Yorkers the long overdue opportunity to hear a major work--Drumfire: A Cantata against War--by the late American and Catholic composer David Kraehenbuehl. The large audience gave the powerful half-hour piece an enthusiastic reception, with many wondering why they had not heard more of this composer's music.

Born in 1923 in Urbana, Illinois, Kraehenbuehl was given every opportunity for musical and intellectual growth, and by his teens he had developed into a brilliant pianist. While he was in the Army in World War II, a chance hearing of a recording of Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler sparked a desire to study with the composer, who was then teaching at Yale. Mustered out in 1946, Kraehenbuehl applied to Yale, where he won the single remaining place in Hindemith's small group of hand-picked students. Hindemith would later call him "the most gifted student I ever had."

A charismatic teacher, Kraehenbuehl first taught at Colorado College, and returned to Yale in 1953 as an assistant professor on Hindemith's recommendation. There he headed the theory department, and, in 1957, founded the Journal of Music Theory (still a major periodical in the field). He enjoyed an enthusiastic following among the students, and was given tenure in 1959. Clearly established in a brilliant academic career, to everyone's surprise and chagrin, he suddenly resigned the following year.

This radical about-face sprang from Kraehenbuehl's lifelong conviction that there was a critical need to improve American music education at the grass-roots level. To this end, he joined the pianoteaching enterprise of Frances Clark and Louise Goss in Princeton, New Jersey, and with them founded The New School for Music Study. As the school's music director, Kraehenbuehl composed a large body of music for The Frances Clark Library for Piano Students, most of which is still in print. These attractive pieces, with titles like "Rocking the Boat," "Ramble," "Musing," and a witty volume of Jazz and Blues, grew from his wonderful sense of the mind and imagination of children.

Because an essential part of the school's mission was teacher training, offered both at the school and at workshops on college campuses throughout the country, Kraehenbuehl spent much time on the road. He did not focus exclusively on letter-perfect performance but attempted to enable the child to explore the keyboard, even to compose. By 1967, no longer fully able to carry out his ideas under Frances Clark, he left the school to form a competing enterprise, National Keyboard Arts Associates. Since his original teaching materials remained with Clark, Kraehenbuehl developed and marketed a second, entirely new piano study program. This venture never achieved the financial success it deserved. Meanwhile, Kraehenbuehl had to meet the needs of his growing family, which eventually included seven children.

Kraehenbuehl had become a Catholic while at Yale. In 1967, he entered a competition, sponsored by the liturgical publishing firm of J.S. Paluch, in which entrants were asked to compose music for the new English liturgy. He submitted Mass for the People of God, a simple but effective unison setting, with organ, for congregational use. So taken were the Paluch officials by the composition and the composer that they awarded Kraehenbuehl first prize and offered him the post of music editor. His long association with Paluch (he subsequently became managing editor and later educational director) included editing and directing the firm's monthly missalettes and its quarterly guide to liturgical practices, Aids in Ministry. He wrote and arranged many pieces of liturgical music, and set up several computer programs. (Unfortunately, the many thousands of parishioners using the Paluch materials had no inkling of Kraehenbuehl's concert music.)

Kraehenbuehl eventually scaled back his work at Paluch, serving as an independent consultant until 1996, the same year his National Keyboard Arts ceased operating. He died the following year in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, where he had moved his family in search of a less expensive and stressful life. At the end, still struggling to make ends meet, he was living on Social Security.

In spite of his many talents and activities, Kraehenbuehl never lost sight of his primary mission--the composition of serious concert music. The 150 such works he left reveal a fully mature artist and a master of all musical media, techniques, and genres, sacred and secular. Nearly all his works were commissioned, and all were performed, many by distinguished artists. Some were published, but many remain in manuscript. Fortunately, Kraehenbuehl's complete concert piano works are available on CD (Random Walks, New World Records), superbly performed by Martha Braden, who also published the scores. (See www.davidkraehenbuehlsociety.org for a complete list of Kraehenbuehl's works, audio clips of seven pieces including Drumfire, plus information on the David Kraehenbuehl Papers, housed at the Music Library of Yale University.) Kraehenbuehl's early music naturally reflects the influence of Hindemith, but his own voice is always distinctive.

Following his conversion to Catholicism, Kraehenbuehl's compositions increasingly reflected a religious inspiration. Some were explicitly liturgical, such as The Betrayal, a motet cycle for Tenebrae; Petitions, a setting of the Advent "O" antiphons; and In Praise of Marriage: A Nuptial Triptych of Psalms (all these dating from 1957). His nonliturgical works include A Concert of the Mysteries (1960), commissioned and performed by a group of string players from the Philadelphia Orchestra; Ash Wednesday, A Commentary on the Poem by T.S. Eliot for cello and piano (1966); and Seven Archaic Images (1974), an orchestral interpretation of poems by Thomas Merton. "I do not compose to express myself," Kraehenbuehl wrote near the end of his life, "rather to represent human experience as effectively as possible. Because human experience is most dramatically presented in Scripture, many of my compositions set scriptural texts or represent scriptural scenes."

The Drumfire cantata was first performed by the Princeton Pro Musica under Frances Slade in 1986. It had been commissioned by a friend and former student, Goff Owen Jr., who sent Kraehenbuehl a volume of poems and other writings that his father, Goff Owen Sr., had composed as an infantryman in France during World War I. From these Kraehenbuehl chose several excerpts for his text. Of the work's nine sections, four are brief descriptive pieces composed for orchestra alone that depict in turn the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--oppression, destruction, famine, and death--whereby Kraehenbuehl takes the young soldier's reactions to war and situates them under the eye of eternity.

Drumfire is full of dissonant sonorities symbolizing the unrelieved tension and disorientation wrought by war. These are overlaid with frequently recurring consonance that provides a kind of tonal stability, one immediately accessible to the listener. The phrases and sections are simple and clear throughout, making it, despite its complex harmonies, easy to grasp and follow. Drumfire was not composed in response to a particular war, and its performance last spring was not billed as an antiwar event, in spite of its obvious timeliness. As in all Kraehenbuehl's serious works, however, its message remains universal. The expressiveness and great power of this composer's music deserve to be much better known.

Charles Burkhart, professor emeritus of the City University of New York, is a pianist and the author of Anthology for Musical Analysis.