Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXV, no. 2 (Summer 1999)
A Eulogy for Steven Edward Gilbert
Steven Gilbert's major achievement in musicology was the marriage of high learning to what he
steadfastly refused to regard as low culture. He wrote the first -- and so far the only -- book
to deem the music of George Gershwin worthy of serious analytical attention. The American musical
establishment has always had a deep-seated ambivalence about Gershwin, dating from Gershwin's own move
from Broadway to the concert hall. Steve Gilbert would have none of it; he knew that the quality
of Gershwin's music was not the result of a series of happy accidents and he sat down to prove it.
Gilbert threw analytical light on a range of styles far beyond what might conventionally be expected
of a professor of music. Indeed, by refusing to subscribe to the snobberies current in much of
musical academia, his students at California State University, Fresno, were expected to examine
rock music alongside their Bach and Beethoven.
GIlbert's first degree was in mathematics, from the City University of New York in 1964. He then
went on to Yale, to take an M.M. in 1967, and M.Phil. in 1969 and his Ph.D. in music theory in 1970.
Even in those early days Gilbert enjoyed the unorthodox. When he first went to Yale, for the
consultation session required for graduate students, he was faced with a committee consisting of
the distinguished theorist Allen Forte and two important composers, Mel Powell and Quincy Porter,
whose father and grandfather had been professors at Yale before him. Forte recalls:
Steve's response to the request that he play something at the piano, anything. He played a Rodgers
and Hart song, which delighted Professor Powell and me and perplexed Professor Porter. This dual
response to Steve was characteristic not only of his career as a graduate student but also of his
career as a mature scholar and musician. Some people just didn't know what to make of him.
It was through his studies with Forte that Gilbert became a "Schenkerian." Schenker's approach,
Gilbert argued, was "useful in depicting basic melodic, contrapuntal, and harmonic structures.
A Schenkerian graph will highlight the main melodic outline of a piece or song along with the large-scale
progression of local key areas. At the same time, it will point out certain details of melodies,
parts of melodies that relate to the larger picture in some significant way."
GIlbert was to remain faithful to this methodology throughout his career, a sympathy that was to lead
to a best-selling textbook, Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis, published by Norton in 1983
and co-authored by Allen Forte.
The Music of Gershwin (Yale University Press, 1995), which took ten years to write, applied
Schenker to what might have appeared, to some musicologists, an unlikely subject. Gilbert's aim was
"to discern and delineate those structural tasks that make the melodies of George Gershwin memorable,"
and he succeeded brilliantly in demonstrating the sophistication and skill that went into the
compositions of music that always strikes the ear as fresh and (in the best sense) artless. Gilbert's
concern was to take his reader with him, though inevitabily the argument soon enters fairly thick
theoretical undergrowth. When I once commented that it required considerable musical literacy
to follow his exposition, he response was typically good-natured and generous: "In retrospect, a
little less musical literacy on my part would have been more profitable."
Gilbert was an enthusiastic member of the Sonneck Society for American Music, writing with especial
understanding on the music of Carl Ruggles, the ultimate individualist ousider. Ruggles's no-nonsense
honesty struck a chord with Gilbert, whose conservative-libertarian views frequently rankled with the
woolly, leftish leanings of many of his colleagues. GIlbert joined debate with gusto, particularly
where he suspected some knee-jerk political correctness was impeding logical, reasoned thought, and
politicized sentimentality disguised as bleeding-heart social conscience regularly attracted his good-humored
scorn. His manner so skillfully balancing bluntness and courtesy that he always retained the
respect of his intellectual adversaries.
Indeed, GIlbert's writing, even in a format as casual as the e-mail (and he was a prolific e-mailer),
always sparkled with wit, and his generous personality was immediately communicative via the computer
screen. Hundreds of scholars around the world -- people who never met him -- now feel they have lost
a close, genuine friend.
The first chapter of his Gershwin book begins with a sentence that its author could have written of
himself: "George Gershwin died young, yet he accomplished much, as if he knew he had little time."
Having had a heart by-pass operation in his early forties, Gilbert was probably aware of the parallel.
At the time of his ridiculously early death from meningitis, his intellectual vigor was undimmed,
harnessed as ever to his catholic tastes. He was working on a book that applied his Schenkerian
methodology to rock and pop music, based on one of his courses of lectures at California State
University, Fresno, where he had taught since 1982. The manuscript may be far enough advanced to
allow eventual publication. An interim tombeau appeared from OUP this spring: a collection of essays
on Gershwin, with a chapter from Steve Gilbert.
--Martin Anderson
Anderson writes on music and economics for a necessarily wide range of publications, including
Fanfare, The Independent, Tempo and The Spectator.
Updated 08/31/98