Repairing the World Through Music: Paul Schoenfield

Composer Paul Schoenfield sits at the piano. (Public Domain)

Composer Paul Schoenfield died on April 29, 2024, in Jerusalem. Almost no one in the press, musical or otherwise, noticed. The New York Times and Washington Post, both of which would almost certainly replate the front page to carry death notices of any number of pop musicians, carried no obituaries. In June, Schoenfield’s publisher released notice of the composer’s passing, and awareness of his death slowly made its way via word-of-mouth through the community to whom it meant the most: classical musicians.

Schoenfield’s “Café Music” (1986), a vibrant score for piano trio (violin, cello and piano), is among the most widely played works of its kind written in the last 50 years. Listen to it in any of the many videos on YouTube and you'll understand why. It is emphatically not modern or post-modern. If a label could be applied, it might be “populist classical,” for the folksy/jazzy rhythms and the clearly tonal melodies that dominate its three movements. Schoenfield said he was inspired to write “Café Music” by memories of playing piano in a steakhouse, and indeed, the score sounds like a classical elaboration of tunes you might hear there.

Unlikely Beginnings

For all that, Schoenfield’s musical beginnings were anything but populist. I know, because I witnessed them. The story of his music’s sea-change from academic to populist-classical is the story of personal transformation.

Paul was a doctoral student when I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona School of Music in the 1970s. Both of us majored in composition, but Paul also majored in piano and mathematics. He was known to all of us as the resident genius of the school. His piano technique was dazzling. In fact, he'd come to UA to study with Ozan Marsh, one of Rachmaninoff’s last students. No one could match him. But Paul’s musical hunger extended to composition, which he studied with Robert Muczynski, a Polish-American composer whose lineage traced back to Chopin through the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin.

Paul’s own music, however, didn’t reflect that legacy. On the contrary, it was as sharply modern and unresolvedly dissonant as any late  20th-century music. I recall hearing his Piano Quintet, which Paul presented as part of his doctoral recital, and thinking: Well, he’s brought one major to bear on another. This is music as computational as the equations he’s mastered as a mathematician.

He was brilliant, and everybody admired and liked him. But his compositions were ice.

Time Has Its Way

Twenty-plus years went by. Sometime in the late 1990s, I was sitting at my desk at The Arizona Republic, where I wrote about the arts. The mail one day brought a CD, one among dozens in the days of compact discs. It caught my attention: “Four Parables for Piano and Orchestra” and other works by Paul Schoenfield. I got out my portable CD player, plugged in some earphones, and listened, fully expecting the Schoenfield style I remembered from the 1970s.

My reaction would best be represented by a string of exclamation points across this page.

This was not ice. It was life and breath and fire and love, regret and despair and hope. I scrambled for the CD label’s contact info and found my way to Paul’s publicist, who set me up with a phone interview.

“Paul,” I said as we began our conversation, “what happened?!”

He knew exactly what I was saying.

His explanation was a tale that might have come out of legend.

An observant Jew, Paul had committed to spending a year in Israel doing volunteer work. That led him to retirement homes and nursing facilities where he tended to the needs of seniors.

“As I heard their stories, I realized that music had meaning in their lives,” I recall him saying. (It’s been 30 years, and my notes have vanished, but I’ll present the gist.)

“Music spoke to these old people. Often their memories were bound up with the music they’d heard in concerts or night clubs or played in their homes. Music wasn’t abstract, like math. It was life.”

The Transformation

Boom! Paul became a composer of unique sound and mission. Listen to “Senility’s Ride” from the “Four Parables” (available on YouTube) and hear an old man’s memories blossom in music. A musical portrait of a man in senility, looking back over his life, it’s clear that he’s on his way out, but—we all are or soon will be. But when the Gershwinian tune that climaxes the piece erupts in sheer joy, we know he’ll have something to take with him.

Paul’s music isn’t pretty; answering dissonant meaninglessness with placid meaninglessness is no answer at all. His music runs the gamut of human emotions from pure fun, in “Café Music,” to what might be called hope-amid-the-ruins in the “Four Parables.”

Every religion in its own way proclaims, “The world is fallen, but it can be saved.” In Judaism, this is “Tikkun olam,” or “repairing the world.” Music is a path of Tikkun olam. It doesn’t deny the fallen nature of the world, but repairs it by wresting beauty out of the ugliness. Paul Schoenfield didn’t know that at first, but he learned it from talking with and caring for his elders. The music he wrote in response, like all meaningful music, can help repair the world.

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