Leonard Stein was a pianist’s thinking-man, a musician’s musician. His dedication to music’s long historical adventure has influenced students, scholars and audiences with his knowledge of the past and illumination of the present. He championed new music for more than sixty years in Los Angeles and abroad.
His main influences were his piano teacher, Richard Buhlig, who gave the first performance in Berlin of Schoenberg’s Op. 11 Piano Pieces, which he taught to Stein; and Arnold Schoenberg, with whom Stein studied from 1935 until 1939 at USC and UCLA. Subsequently, Stein became Schoenberg’s assistant at UCLA and edited Schoenberg’s texts on harmony, counterpoint and composition in works such as Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, published in 1975. Stein led the legendary “Encounters” series in the 1960s bringing composers from the world over to discuss and present their latest works. He taught at several universities including USC, CalArts, Pomona College, Cal State Dominguez Hills, and Los Angeles City College, among others. His pupils included composers, conductors, pianists, singers, theorist, historians and other musicians. In 1975 Stein was appointed founding director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC, a position he held until 1991.
A much-sought-after speaker, lecturer and guest professor, he held his audiences spellbound, even when analyzing theoretically thorny works. Stein founded Piano Spheres with four other pianists in 1994 and remained its Artistic Director until his death, June 24, 2004.
See below for personal reminiscences about Leonard Stein
LA Times Articles:
Piano Spheres has lost its founder and Artistic Director. Leonard Stein, our dear friend and mentor, died peacefully in Burbank, California, June 24, 2004.
According to his will, Leonard’s ashes were scattered at sea on 7/9/04 off the coast of Long Beach, California. Members of the family, friends and the Piano Spheres artists participated in the simple ceremony. It was a beautiful day with blue skies as the boat circled while we threw flowers in the sea to mark the spot.
Stein was a revered musical resource in Los Angeles. He was composer Arnold Schoenberg’s teaching assistant at UCLA, personal assistant until 1951, edited Schoenberg’s Style and Idea as well as other theoretical and musical works of Schoenberg, and became founding Director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California from 1975 until his retirement in 1991. Although Leonard Stein’s name will always be closely linked with Arnold Schoenberg as one of that composer’s foremost interpreters, he was ecumenical in his musical interests and befriended most of the world’s leading composers, conducting and performing their music throughout his career. He was mentor and teacher to some of the outstanding composers and musicians of today including Marni Nixon, Kimball Wheeler, Dean Drummond, LaMonte Young, Catherine Gayer and Jacalyn Bauer Kreitzer. As impresario, he presented over 400 composers (most of them still living) in his tenure at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, and as Mark Swed wrote recently, his “…Encounters series in Pasadena [made] Southern California a focal point for the most advanced music from Europe, Asia and America.” After his retirement he founded Piano Spheres concerts enlisting, as he said, “the best, young pianists in Los Angeles” who with Stein have for 10 years performed piano music of many periods, prodding audiences to participate in appreciating the creation of new works, many commissioned by the pianists themselves. His lectures, lecture-concerts and participation in conferences and symposia seemed effortless and immanently approachable, belying exhaustive research and musical analysis as he offered inspired insights into the music; he continued to lecture and perform internationally until his death. Stein was a “musician’s musician”, raconteur and willing sparring partner with musical Los Angeles.