Howard Shanet, 87, a Conductor and Composer, Dies
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By ALLAN KOZINN, NY Times
Published: June 22, 2006
Howard Shanet, a conductor, composer and professor at Columbia
University who wrote an important history of the New York Philharmonic,
died on Monday. He was 87 and lived in Manhattan.
His wife, Bernice Grafstein, announced his death.
As a conductor, Mr. Shanet appeared with several major American
orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic and the Boston
Symphony, and he frequently performed in New York with the
organizations he founded, Music-in-the-Making and String Revival. He
was partial to new music and unusual works that had become eclipsed,
like Sousa's operetta "El Capitan"; a Schubert opera, "Die
Zwillingsbrüder" ("The Twin Brothers"), for which he commissioned an
English libretto from Chester Kallman; and Gottschalk's "Night in the
Tropics," which became popular in the 1970's in Mr. Shanet's
reconstruction.
Mr. Shanet was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 9, 1918. He began his musical
studies as a cellist and earned a bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1939
and a master's in musicology, as a student of Paul Henry Lang, at
Columbia in 1941. That year he joined the faculty of Hunter College. He
also served in the Pacific from 1942 to 1946.
After World War II Mr. Shanet studied composition with Bohuslav Martinu
and Aaron Copland and conducting with Serge Koussevitzky and Fritz
Stiedry. He was a conducting assistant to Leonard Bernstein at the New
York City Symphony in the early 1950's and wrote program notes for the
New York Philharmonic in 1959 and 1960.
He eventually returned to the Philharmonic in a different guise, as a
historian researching his "Philharmonic: A History of New York's
Orchestra," published in 1975. Four years later, when books about the
orchestra by Henry Edward Krehbiel, James Gibbons Huneker and John
Erskine were reissued together as "Early Histories of the New York
Philharmonic," Mr. Shanet wrote an introduction and historical notes.
He also published a music textbook, "Learn to Read Music," in 1956.
In 1953 Mr. Shanet joined Columbia as a professor of music and a
conductor of the university's orchestra. He was chairman of Columbia's
music department from 1972 to 1978 and later was a professor emeritus.
As a composer, Mr. Shanet wrote music for orchestra, string quartet and
band.
In addition to his wife of 43 years, Mr. Shanet is survived by a son,
Laurence Paul Shanet of Manhattan.