Mark Brunswick
Encyclopedia
Mark Brunswick was an American composer
of the Twentieth Century. He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen’s The Masterbuilder when he died suddenly in London
in May, 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick. Mark had been at work on the opera for several years, and Act I had not long before received a concert performance as a work in progress at The City College of New York.
Born in New York City
, Mark was the third of four children of secular Jewish parents. His father, of an Alsacian family background, was a successful manufacturer in the garment industry. His mother was an educated German-born woman, trained as an opera singer, who encouraged Mark’s artistic interests and his pursuit of an education that diverged from the conventional.
He attended the Horace Mann School
in New York, and later Phillips Exeter Academy
in New Hampshire. Though he took some courses in the extension division of Columbia University
, he never formally acquired a college degree. Having by the age of 15 decided on a career of musical composition and theory, he sought out private musical study: piano with Victor Wittgenstein; harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Rubin Goldmark
(himself a student of Dvořák
); and composition with Ernest Bloch
in Cleveland (where he met fellow student Roger Sessions
, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship), and Nadia Boulanger
in Paris.
In 1924, Mark moved to Vienna
. There he fell in love with Ruth Mack, a student, analysand (since 1922), and collaborative colleague of Sigmund Freud
’s, and married at the time to Dr. Herman Blumgart, a cousin of Mark’s. As a teenager, Mark had actually been a guest at their wedding years earlier in 1917. Their marriage was by now in serious trouble, however, and in 1928, Mark and Ruth were married in Vienna. Freud served as their witness – one of the few weddings he ever even attended.
The couple returned briefly to the U.S. so that their daughter, Matilda (Til) could be born there, then returned soon after the birth to Vienna. Though it would later in Freudian analytic circles certainly be regarded as improper, Mark, Ruth and their daughter Til were close friends of the Freuds, and socialized with them regularly. Mark’s home movies of Freud now reside in the archive of the Freud Museum in London. During his years in Vienna – inspired no doubt by Freud’s own collection – Mark began acquiring the antiquities and rare old books that so characterized his various residences.
Probably his primary musical association in Vienna was with Anton Webern
. Whether he was formally a student of Webern's is unclear. A letter written to Mark in New York, dated June 23, 1938, addresses him as "guter, alter Freund," and "lieber Freund," and, after giving news of performances of some Webern works, goes on to ask, "Was machen jetzt die schönen Rosen in der Hasenauerstrasse? Verlassen? War es doch gerade vor einem Jahre, dass wir uns dort bei unerhört prächtigem Weine - sagen wir: besauften!!! Ich hoffe, es kommt wieder!" He signs the letter, "Ihr alter Webern." What is clear from this letter is that the two were on close terms during at least part of Mark's Vienna period. What other musical friendships and contacts he had there are so far unknown, although it is hard to imagine they would have been insignificant.
In 1937, Mark and Ruth were divorced in Vienna, but – against Freud’s advice – remarried six months later. Late that year, Mark returned alone to New York. Ruth, Til, Mark’s mother, and the family dog followed his return the following year in March, 1938.
With fascism
ominously ascendant in Germany and Austria, Mark became Chairman of the National Committee for Refugee Musicians, and was pivotal in finding placement into musical and academic positions in the U.S. for hundreds of European colleagues fleeing Hitler. In this capacity he had a fairly regular correspondence with Schoenberg, who was now living in Southern California. No mention is made in those extant letters of any previous contact, and of course Schoenberg had moved to Berlin in 1924, the year Mark arrived in Vienna.
Before his appointment as Chairman of the Music Department at the City College of New York
in 1946, Mark headed the music theory and composition department at the Greenwich House Settlement Music School (1938–43). He also taught at Black Mountain College
in North Carolina (summer of 1944), the Music Institute of Kenyon College
(summer of 1945), and Brooklyn College
(1945–46). In addition to his teaching, Mark – together with Roger Sessions and Eduard Steuermann
– was active in organizing concerts of modern music under the rubric “Contemporary Concerts.” From 1941 to 1950 he was President of the American Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music
.
Mark and Ruth divorced permanently in 1945, and Mark was married for several years to a former student at Black Mountain. In 1959 he married Natascha Artin, with whom he lived happily for the remainder of his life. He moved from his apartment in Manhattan
to Natascha’s house in Princeton, NJ, where he resumed his long and intimate friendship with Roger Sessions, then on the faculty at Princeton. Mark and Natascha spent each summer in the log cabin Mark had purchased on a small island in Franklin Falls Pond (a section of the Saranac River) in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
During his tenure as Chairman at CCNY (he retired in 1965), Mark was a fierce and active defender of academic freedom amid the McCarthy hysteria
of the early 1950’s. In April, 1954, on the occasion of “Academic Freedom Week” at City College, Mark was presented an award to “the faculty member who has done the most to promote and safeguard academic freedom.” Interviewed for the campus newspaper, Mark commented self-efacingly, “I’m truly thrilled. But I haven’t really done that much. All I’ve ever done is spoken my mind at every appropriate place.” Mark also worked actively in the 1952 presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson.
An unsolicited letter of appreciation from a Smith College
student who had been a visitor to one of his classes epitomizes Mark’s informal and sensitive teaching style: “You created an atmosphere that I’m quite unused to here at Smith, in which the professor is interested in the students’ ideas and feelings, rather than merely a coherent arrangement of cold, objective facts . . . It’s easy to see that yours is a true give and take relationship with your students as people.” Mark himself once commented on teaching, "In it I can lose myself, and at the same time be refreshed by contact with students and their works in my own creative work and in my whole relation to music."
Mark was not a prolific composer; in fact he found composition difficult, and even complained of being blocked creatively. “In this musical world of today, with its conflicting and uncertain tendencies and influences, the achieving and maintaining of true individuality and purity of musical thought will always require an intensity of effort and of imagination that can never be easy,” he said.
Chamber music
Organ
Vocal
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
of the Twentieth Century. He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen’s The Masterbuilder when he died suddenly in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in May, 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick. Mark had been at work on the opera for several years, and Act I had not long before received a concert performance as a work in progress at The City College of New York.
Born in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, Mark was the third of four children of secular Jewish parents. His father, of an Alsacian family background, was a successful manufacturer in the garment industry. His mother was an educated German-born woman, trained as an opera singer, who encouraged Mark’s artistic interests and his pursuit of an education that diverged from the conventional.
He attended the Horace Mann School
Horace Mann School
Horace Mann School is an independent college preparatory school in New York City, New York, United States founded in 1887 known for its rigorous course of studies. Horace Mann is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League, educating students from all across the New York tri-state area from...
in New York, and later Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...
in New Hampshire. Though he took some courses in the extension division of Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, he never formally acquired a college degree. Having by the age of 15 decided on a career of musical composition and theory, he sought out private musical study: piano with Victor Wittgenstein; harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Rubin Goldmark
Rubin Goldmark
Rubin Goldmark was an American composer, pianist, and educator. Although in his time he was an often performed American nationalist composer, his works are seldom played – instead he is known as the teacher of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin...
(himself a student of Dvořák
Antonín Dvorák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...
); and composition with Ernest Bloch
Ernest Bloch
Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer.-Life:Bloch was born in Geneva and began playing the violin at age 9. He began composing soon afterwards. He studied music at the conservatory in Brussels, where his teachers included the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe...
in Cleveland (where he met fellow student Roger Sessions
Roger Sessions
Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, critic, and teacher of music.-Life:Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendent of Samuel Huntington, a signer of...
, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship), and Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many composers and performers of the 20th century.From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but believing that her talent as a composer was inferior to that of her younger...
in Paris.
In 1924, Mark moved to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
. There he fell in love with Ruth Mack, a student, analysand (since 1922), and collaborative colleague of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
’s, and married at the time to Dr. Herman Blumgart, a cousin of Mark’s. As a teenager, Mark had actually been a guest at their wedding years earlier in 1917. Their marriage was by now in serious trouble, however, and in 1928, Mark and Ruth were married in Vienna. Freud served as their witness – one of the few weddings he ever even attended.
The couple returned briefly to the U.S. so that their daughter, Matilda (Til) could be born there, then returned soon after the birth to Vienna. Though it would later in Freudian analytic circles certainly be regarded as improper, Mark, Ruth and their daughter Til were close friends of the Freuds, and socialized with them regularly. Mark’s home movies of Freud now reside in the archive of the Freud Museum in London. During his years in Vienna – inspired no doubt by Freud’s own collection – Mark began acquiring the antiquities and rare old books that so characterized his various residences.
Probably his primary musical association in Vienna was with Anton Webern
Anton Webern
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...
. Whether he was formally a student of Webern's is unclear. A letter written to Mark in New York, dated June 23, 1938, addresses him as "guter, alter Freund," and "lieber Freund," and, after giving news of performances of some Webern works, goes on to ask, "Was machen jetzt die schönen Rosen in der Hasenauerstrasse? Verlassen? War es doch gerade vor einem Jahre, dass wir uns dort bei unerhört prächtigem Weine - sagen wir: besauften!!! Ich hoffe, es kommt wieder!" He signs the letter, "Ihr alter Webern." What is clear from this letter is that the two were on close terms during at least part of Mark's Vienna period. What other musical friendships and contacts he had there are so far unknown, although it is hard to imagine they would have been insignificant.
In 1937, Mark and Ruth were divorced in Vienna, but – against Freud’s advice – remarried six months later. Late that year, Mark returned alone to New York. Ruth, Til, Mark’s mother, and the family dog followed his return the following year in March, 1938.
With fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
ominously ascendant in Germany and Austria, Mark became Chairman of the National Committee for Refugee Musicians, and was pivotal in finding placement into musical and academic positions in the U.S. for hundreds of European colleagues fleeing Hitler. In this capacity he had a fairly regular correspondence with Schoenberg, who was now living in Southern California. No mention is made in those extant letters of any previous contact, and of course Schoenberg had moved to Berlin in 1924, the year Mark arrived in Vienna.
Before his appointment as Chairman of the Music Department at the City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
in 1946, Mark headed the music theory and composition department at the Greenwich House Settlement Music School (1938–43). He also taught at Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
in North Carolina (summer of 1944), the Music Institute of Kenyon College
Kenyon College
Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, founded in 1824 by Bishop Philander Chase of The Episcopal Church, in parallel with the Bexley Hall seminary. It is the oldest private college in Ohio...
(summer of 1945), and Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
(1945–46). In addition to his teaching, Mark – together with Roger Sessions and Eduard Steuermann
Eduard Steuermann
Eduard Steuermann was an Austrian pianist and composer. The actress Salka Viertel was his sister...
– was active in organizing concerts of modern music under the rubric “Contemporary Concerts.” From 1941 to 1950 he was President of the American Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music
International Society for Contemporary Music
The International Society for Contemporary Music is a music organization that promotes contemporary classical music.ISCM was established in 1922, in Salzburg. Its core activity is the World Music Days Festival, held every year at a different location. The festival includes cutting edge productions...
.
Mark and Ruth divorced permanently in 1945, and Mark was married for several years to a former student at Black Mountain. In 1959 he married Natascha Artin, with whom he lived happily for the remainder of his life. He moved from his apartment in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
to Natascha’s house in Princeton, NJ, where he resumed his long and intimate friendship with Roger Sessions, then on the faculty at Princeton. Mark and Natascha spent each summer in the log cabin Mark had purchased on a small island in Franklin Falls Pond (a section of the Saranac River) in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
During his tenure as Chairman at CCNY (he retired in 1965), Mark was a fierce and active defender of academic freedom amid the McCarthy hysteria
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
of the early 1950’s. In April, 1954, on the occasion of “Academic Freedom Week” at City College, Mark was presented an award to “the faculty member who has done the most to promote and safeguard academic freedom.” Interviewed for the campus newspaper, Mark commented self-efacingly, “I’m truly thrilled. But I haven’t really done that much. All I’ve ever done is spoken my mind at every appropriate place.” Mark also worked actively in the 1952 presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson.
An unsolicited letter of appreciation from a Smith College
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
student who had been a visitor to one of his classes epitomizes Mark’s informal and sensitive teaching style: “You created an atmosphere that I’m quite unused to here at Smith, in which the professor is interested in the students’ ideas and feelings, rather than merely a coherent arrangement of cold, objective facts . . . It’s easy to see that yours is a true give and take relationship with your students as people.” Mark himself once commented on teaching, "In it I can lose myself, and at the same time be refreshed by contact with students and their works in my own creative work and in my whole relation to music."
Mark was not a prolific composer; in fact he found composition difficult, and even complained of being blocked creatively. “In this musical world of today, with its conflicting and uncertain tendencies and influences, the achieving and maintaining of true individuality and purity of musical thought will always require an intensity of effort and of imagination that can never be easy,” he said.
Selected works
Orchestral- Symphony in B (1948)
- Air with Toccata for string orchestra (1967)
- Nocturne and Rondo for orchestra
Chamber music
- Fantasia for viola solo (1933)
- 2 Movements for string quartet (1937)
- Seven Trios for string quartet (1955)
- Septet in Seven Movements for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, viola and cello (1957)
- Quartet for violin, viola, cello and double bass (1960)
Organ
- Das alte Jahr vergangen ist, Chorale Prelude for organ (1933)
Vocal
- Fragment of Sappho, Motet for mixed chorus a cappella (1937)
- Four Songs for tenor and piano (1964)