Mel Powell A Veterans Day Discovery

Ross Amico

November 11, 2020

On this Veterans Day, here’s a pleasant discovery: Mel Powell’s “Homage to Debussy.”

Powell served with (and played with) Glenn Miller during World War II. He also collaborated with Benny Goodman, Raymond Scott, and Django Reinhardt, among others. Hearing Goodman perform for the first time is what shifted his focus, for a period, from classical music to jazz. After the war, he wound up writing music for movies and cartoons, including Tom and Jerry.

Muscular dystrophy effectively ended his career as a traveling musician. Instead, he returned to his classical roots, studying composition at Yale with Paul Hindemith. His early works were conceived in a neoclassical style. Gradually, however, he began to push into atonality and serialism. He taught at Mannes College of Music and Queens College, in New York, then succeeded Hindemith as chair of the Yale composition faculty. There, he also directed one of the country’s first electronic music studios. But he never completely turned his back on jazz.

Powell was living in California, where he had served as provost and professor of music at CalArts, when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1990. The honored work, “Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” was inspired by a conversation he had over four decades earlier, while serving in the U.S. Army Air Force .

“… I was in Paris and met an old musician who knew Debussy and would regale us with anecdotes. I’ve forgotten most of the stories, but one thing he told me has come back to me frequently over the years. It was about a time he and Debussy were having a glass of wine at the Chat Noir, and Debussy said: ‘Do you know what the perfect music would be? A perpetual cadenza. It would be like a chain of gold coins, each like the other, but different enough to claim independence.’ I’ve never forgotten that. And that became my goal for ‘Duplicates.’”

Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be an audio file of the work posted online.

Powell died in 1998, at the age of 75. He was married to Martha Scott, an actress probably best-remembered for playing Charlton Heston’s mother in both “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur.” She also played Emily in the original Broadway production of “Our Town” and in the film version, opposite William Holden.

We may not have access to “Duplicates,” but there’s certainly plenty of Powell to enjoy, when following the links below:

“The Earl” (1941)