When Shulamit Ran was growing up in her native Israel and looked at poetry–or any kind of verse–she heard melodies. “I just assumed that everyone heard them the same as I did,” she says. Only later, when her piano teacher began to write some of them down for her, did she begin to realize her special gift.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When Ran was 14, she auditioned for a television spot on Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert. “I was there as a performer,” she recalls, “and I brought two pieces: the Beethoven Second Piano Concerto, to show that I could play the piano in a normal fashion, and my own Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. I walked in, and Bernstein was quite surprised when I said, ‘Maestro, would you like to see a score?’ ‘Oh, a score,’ he said, with a great irony in his voice, and I could see that he thought this was the funniest thing he had ever seen: this little girl walking in, not only playing her own piece, but asking him if he’d like to see a score.
Ran continued to compose, and a piece of hers about the holocaust, All the Chimneys, found its way onto a Vox/Turnabout recording as the flip side of a piece, “as luck would have it,” she says, by an established composer, George Rochberg. That recording caught the attention of Ralph Shapey, who was trying to fill a new composition post at the University of Chicago. Shapey has said that he was so impressed with the piece that he threw the record onto the desk of the department chairman and said, “There is our composer.”
“One of my principal aims,” she says, “is to write music that challenges the mind and the heart in equal measure. So much music today is one-dimensional, but I like music that communicates on many levels–cerebral, yet it touches within us a common sense of what it means to be human.”
