Leon Kirchner
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 6, 2012, the following Minute was placed upon the records. Leon Kirchner was born in Brooklyn on January 24, 1919, and died in Manhattan some 90 years later, on September 17, 2009. These proximate locations mask the geographical and artistic odyssey of his life. Raised in Los Angeles, he studied with Ernest Bloch and Arnold Schoenberg, later working with Roger Sessions. Kirchner taught at the University of Southern California and Mills College before his appointment at Harvard University in 1961, where he was Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music from 1966 until his retirement in 1989. Kirchner’s music, which eschews the rigorous twelve-tone method practiced by Schoenberg, is imbued with searing intensity that bespeaks a spirit that relentlessly and mercilessly revealed his own complex and at times anguished personality. Its expressive power resulted in awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the...