Alan Shulman 1915–2002

Alan Shulman was a versatile musician, as much at home in jazz as in classical idioms. As a cellist he played for many years under Toscanini and in several chamber groups and jazz ensembles. As a composer, his music was championed by the conductors Guido Cantelli, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein, the violinist Jascha Heifetz, the cellist Leonard Rose, and the jazz clarinettist Artie Shaw.

Shulman undertook his first serious music lessons at the Peabody Conservatory in his native city of Baltimore, where he studied cello and theory. When he was fourteen, his family moved to Brooklyn, where, thanks to a New York Philharmonic scholarship and, later, a scholarship to the Juilliard School, he counted among his teachers Felix Salmond and Emanuel Feuermann for cello, and Bernard Wagenaar and Paul Hindemith for composition.

After graduating from Juilliard in 1937, Shulman became a founding member of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra and apart from a period in the US Maritime Service he remained with it and its successor, the Symphony of the Air, until 1952.

A highly respected chamber musician throughout his career, Shulman was a member of several ensembles, including the Kreiner String Quartet (1935—38), the Philharmonia Trio (1962—69), the Haydn Quartet (1972—82), and the Stuyvesant String Quartet, which he formed with his violist brother, Sylvan, in 1938. During the sixteen years they were together, the Stuyvesants were noted for their adventurous contemporary repertoire. They gave the US premiere of Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet at Carnegie Hall in 1941 and made many recordings. A recent reissue on CD of their renditions of quartets by Hindemith, Villa-Lobos and Quincy Porter testifies to their catholicity of repertoire.

At the same time as his classical work, Shulman’s gifts as a jazz musician were not neglected. From 1939 to 1947 he recorded with the symphonic jazz group New Friends of Rhythm, whose line-up included the harpist Laura Newell, jazz clarinettists Buster Bailey and Hank D’Amico, singer Maxine Sullivan, as well as members of the Stuyvesant String Quartet directed by Sylvan Shulman. Time magazine called them ‘Toscanini’s hep-cats’Shulman wrote his first composition at the age of ten, and while still a student composed incidental music for a New York performance of the play The Chinese nightingale. Although he excelled in the smaller genres — his Theme and Variations for viola and piano (1940) has become something of a classic, he also tackled more ambitious forms, notably a cello concerto (1948) dedicated to the People of the State of Israel. This was premiered in 1950 by Leonard Rose and the New York Philharmonic.

Shulman was also active as a teacher — at Sarah Lawrence College, the Juilliard School, the State University of New York at Purchase, Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont, and the University of Maine in Orono — and a leading light in the Violoncello Society, whose president he was from 1967 to 1972. In 1997 he was appointed Chevalier du Violoncelle at Indiana University.

A retrospective of Shulman’s orchestral music, including Cantelli’s 1951 recording of A Laurentian overture, Emanuel Vardi’s account of the Theme and Variations, and a recording by Bernstein of his arrangement of the Israeli national anthem has just been released by Bridge Records.

Alan Shulman: born Baltimore, Maryland, 4 June 1915; died Hudson, New York, 10 July 2002.