Music of Chicago Composer Dan Tucker

           Over the last four decades, critics have praised the music of Chicago composer Dan Tucker for its "flair for melody" (Joseph McLellan, Washington Post), and for qualities they have called "moving," "impish," "hallucinating," and even "sublime." In all the evolving styles and idioms that Tucker's music has reflected in that time, melody has always been its mainstay, and remains so now that "melody" is no longer a word of critical scorn.

Performances

            His works for orchestra, chorus, opera ensembles, chamber groups, and solo voice  have been performed in the United States, Europe and South America. Among notable performances are these:

•     The Chicago Symphony Orchestra: scenes from Tucker's ballet Hopscotch and Celebration for Orchestra, a work commissioned for the 1976 Bicentennial observance. 
   

•     The National Symphony Orchestra under Mstislav Rostropovich: overture to the opera Many Moons and Differences, a work commissioned by Rostropovich and performed by the NSO in 1988 at its traditional Fourth of July concert on the Capitol lawn.
   

•     The Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest: the two-act opera Many Moons, with Tucker's own libretto based on a story by James Thurber, produced in 1990 after several performances in the Chicago area.
   

•     His Majestie's Clerkes (now Bella Voce) under Anne Heider: The 1988 premiere of A Dream of the Rood, a setting for chorus and harp of an 8th Century Anglo-Saxon poem on the Crucifixion. 
   

•    The Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra under Alan Heatherington: Chamber Symphony, a three-movement work that had won a national prize for composition. (In his remarks to the audience at that 1999 performance, conductor Heatherington described the symphony as "one of those pieces that, when you see the score, you say, 'I've got to play this.'").
   

•     Patrice Michaels, soprano: Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames, four songs in fraudulent French (Un petit d'un petit, Chacun Gille, Lit-elle messe moffette, Eau la quille ne colle), based on Mother Goose rhymes, broadcast nationally in 2004 from Chicago's classical music station WFMT.

These works have received particularly warm praise from critics and performers. The Chicago Tribune's John Von Rhein described Chamber Symphony as "expertly scored in a warm tonal idiom spiced with bitonality," discovered in it "hints of Copeland and Hindemith," and singled out its last movement as "a quirky Irish jig that sends one home with a smile." The Chicago Reader's Dennis Polkow called A Dream of the Rood "a work of sublime beauty and originality." Critic Robert Kameczura, in an interview with Tucker on the Internet's Red Magazine, called him "a composer whose music is alive with a depth of spirit which betrays a mind of great range, spirituality and emotional depth." And Patrice Michaels, commenting during the broadcast on Tucker's pseudo-French songs, called them "a perfect setting" and "delightful." 
 

Composer Dan Tucker           

           Tucker was born in Chicago in 1925.  After service in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, he continued working as a journalist, and meanwhile took bachelor's and master's degree in piano and composition from the American Conservatory of Music. He combined two careers as newspaperman and composer from 1953 until 1988, when he retired from the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune to concentrate on music.

            Tucker's approach to composition is based on his belief that hearing, in any organism that can detect sound, has a basic survival function. It reveals unseen movements nearby and focuses instant attention on living movement--actions that might involve the hearer. It follows that the most interesting sounds are those that share qualities of life--motion, direction, purpose--and this fact has special importance for the composer. Musical works that ignore this life-detecting function of hearing, he contends, are unlikely to last beyond the stage of novelty.

            Tucker is a composer in residence for the Music Institute of Chicago, which has premiered many of his works. He and his wife Margaret live in Evanston, Illinois.

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