On Monday, April 22, 2019, Priscilla Huffman, widow of composer Walter Spencer Huffman, agreed to meet for an oral interview discussing Huffman’s life, studies, work, and his compositions. Priscilla showed a clear interest in her husband’s work, giving details about his teaching style and his preferred methods of composition. Additionally, Pricilla provided some insight into why Huffman wrote the diverse styles of pieces that are collected within the Peabody Archives in the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Recorded below is the transcript of the interview with Pricilla Huffman conducted by two Peabody students.

Transcript of Interview with Priscilla:

Melanie: So first we wanted to know how he got into composition and what he liked most about it and his story of writing music.

Priscilla: Spencer was born in Towson, so he grew up in the Baltimore area and he was interested in and started writing music at a fairly young age. His parents got him an old piano and he taught himself to read music. And one of the things He enjoyed doing was reading scores even as a young person and creating two hand arrangements of scores including The Rite of Spring. It was one of his favorite things which he committed to memory and liked showing off in Peabody classes. Stravinsky was an early influence on his music. Some of his Peabody professors called him a young Beethoven because he grew up with a reverence for classical forms, sonata form, rondo, and Beethoven was certainly an early hero for him. And as his musical life progressed, Brahms.  Very widely played in Baltimore area and even Washington D.C. and New York and was considered an up and coming young composers in Baltimore. If you go to archives there are a lot of reviews from works that were performed in the late 40s/50s which is one of his most prolific times. He was a student at Peabody got an Artist Diploma in composition. His study was interrupted by WWII to some extent but when he came back, he completed his work at Peabody and then he Joined the faculty in 1949 and was on the faculty for 7 years. He had very distinct views on contemporary music and it got him into hot water because he was extremely outspoken. One of the things I admired about Spencer was he never personalized an argument. So, he never attacked a person individually for what they believed or thought about music even if it was very different from his. But he would make his point in relation to the music. He could state a position and evaluate it. People thought of him as a very vehemently person, but he really spoke in terms of ideas instead of personalizing things and he was like that consistently throughout his life. There are two very distinct periods in his music. As an early composer, his big influence was Stravinsky. I won’t say his music sounds like Stravinsky, but he developed in his early years a form, a harmonic language, that is approach harmony and it sounds very very different. It’s interesting to read his comments about contemporary music and see what he was writing. After he left Peabody, he wrote some but pretty much he dropped composition. Took over piano practice in Bethesda. His instrument was keyboard. As he started to get more composition students he started writing again. He really started producing again and then He wrote consistently until his death in 2005. The last five or six years were not as productive. So, have you listened to much of his music?

Abby: Just a little bit and were planning on going in tomorrow to listen to some cassette tapes.

Priscilla: Yes, I went through a bunch of them there was over 700 of them.

Melanie: So, we talked about Influences, you said Stravinsky and Brahms. Did he have a favorite instrument to compose for?

Priscilla: He liked viola and his viola writing is just beautiful. He thought the literature for viola was not as extensive as it should have been. French horn, winds, clarinet were all some, really all of them. He wrote for every instrument and one of his goals was to write a sonata for every instrument in the concert band and he actually did that. So, through the 70s and early 80s, he wrote a sonata for every instrument in the concert band. Every unusual instrument he has a sonata for it and he was very proud of that collection.

Melanie: How did he feel about writing for the voice?

Priscila: He talked a lot about songwriting and I would like to talk about that some. First of all, I want to say he has a collection of 60 songs in his first three volumes and an additional volume with 10 more. Yes. He felt Brahms songs were very underrated. Brahms songs are very approachable because they are probably the easiest piano writing Brahms did, so they are fairly playable Some of his music isn’t as easily sight-readable. And he had a collection of songs that he wrote on Brahms texts and it’s really interesting to compare his setting and Brahms settings on those songs. So, I hope that somebody here will look at those with them being available at Peabody. He also wrote some settings on Schubert. So, songwriting. Text setting was one of the most important elements of songwriting for him. And if you look at his song and look at the music compares to what the words mean and the emphasis of the words often those songs will reflect those cadences. A good example of not doing that is Handel’s Messiah “FOR unto us a child is born.” And the other element is staying out of the way of the voice and make piano accompaniments readable and playable. Spencer was a great believer in knowing the literature and being able to sit down and play almost anything. Sight reading is the first thing he talked to his piano students about. Most of these song accompaniments are readable. They are never trying to be difficult for the pianist. They are there to support the voice line and emphasize the text. It’s really an interesting study to see how his songs are set. Most of them are through-composed but at the same time there’s a formal sense to all of them like everything he did.

Melanie: Did he have any favorite singers or specific singers in mind when writing for the voice?

Priscilla: No, he didn’t. I can say he didn’t. I think all tenor, soprano, alto, and bass are all represented probably fewer for bass, but he was not as interested in performers as he was in composers.

Abby: As a follow up question to that, did he have any favorite poets or texts that he drew from most often?

Priscilla: Yes. He looked at German Romantic poets. Similarly, to poets that Schubert looked at. Some of his larger works are from older German masters but many of them are based on German romantic period. He was very careful in text choices. He would also tweak the language to make the text a better musical line. So, if you actually look at it you’ll see some variance in the language. He spent a lot of time looking for texts and was very particular on what he used.

Melanie: How would you summarize Huffman’s creative and compositional style in a few words?

Priscilla: It’s hard to say just a few words about Spencer Huffman especially for me. But I would say look at…matt may have copies of some of this stuff I just gave him but there’s this brochure spencer had with his credo about his music. But he Definitely believed that music should be approachable by everyone so the idea that music is esoteric or that contemporary music is for intellectuals to understand is the complete opposite of what he thought. He felt that music should be for people to enjoy. And because of that, he believed Music reached a peak in the beauty of it in the later 1800s with Brahms. That was the pinnacle of music for him. It reached Peak of perfection at that time. Then it went off with Wagner and then atonal music and found a new harmonic language.

Melanie :What were some of the challenges that Huffman faced as a composer throughout his career?

Priscilla :I’d say as a composer in his later music people didn’t understand why he wanted to write music that sounded like it was written 100 years ago. So, there was very little interest were talking about 1960,70, and 80s. He would send scores off and no one would understand why he wanted to write music like that. I think that pendulum has swung in a different direction now and there’s an appreciation that if that is what someone wants to create and compose that should be respected and it Shouldn’t be evaluated against where we are in some continuum of music’s evolution. So, he had a very hard time getting things performed. There was just no interest, people thought I’m not going to play this because it doesn’t sound contemporary.

Some of the things he wrote were really written to be beautiful and to be performed but they were also written with his composition students in mind. So, he was demonstrating techniques of piano writings. They are both teaching pieces and pieces to be performed. They are interesting and beautiful to listen to, but they served a secondary purpose as well.

Melanie:Are there any compositions of his that are your favorite?

Priscilla:Yes, the piano quintet and the two string quartets. They are really masterpieces. The piano quintet is a masterpiece. Spencer had a group of composition students where every Sunday afternoon he had a group of players from the national symphony come to play through student’s pieces. When studying with Spencer you always started with Mozart. He would have an hour-long class and you’d be given a problem such as “Were going to write a rondo today” and you’d be given the instruments and whatever you could do in that hour was done. Depending on how developed you were you might get all the way done or just a little bit and then we would critique them. What a wonderful experience it was. You couldn’t touch the piano you got music paper and a pencil. He would show you what you could do better and make changes.

Melanie: Do you want to talk a little bit about how you met him?

Priscilla: I used to sing in a choir in Mt. Washington and the organist and singers came from Peabody. After choir rehearsal, they’d sit and talk but they were always talking about Peabody. They’d start talking about Spencer Huffman and would not stop talking about him after they started. There were just stories and stories. “Spencer Huffman knows more about music than anyone today”. Spencer Huffman teaches out of his basement, he’s so reclusive but he’s so knowledgeable. And I thought this man just sounds fascinating. So, I decided I did want to study composition and I knew there were a lot of good schools on the west coast. I moved to the west coast and started interviewing at schools. Theo Morrison, a friend, told me if you’re interested in composition there’s only one person to study with and that’s Spencer Huffman back on the East Coast. So, I came back home, called him up, and in July 1976 I started taking lessons and then in the Fall I moved in with him and I studied every day. I mean I had a lesson every two hours if I wanted. I progressed really quickly. Then we got married and we were together for 30 years. It was a wonderful life. I feel very, very privileged to spend my life with him. And I really feel like My mission in life was to help him write music. He never made a lot of money teaching, but I went back to work full time. But I felt like because I did that, he was able to produce what he did.

Melanie: Is there anything you want us to know that we haven’t asked?

Priscilla: In terms of his teaching, the reason he was such a good teacher is…I mentioned to you everyone had to know how to learn to read music. When you came to learn piano, you weren’t coming to learn technique, you came to learn how to read. So how does someone read something when they’re just starting out and don’t know what to do. So, here’s what he would do. You had to buy a tape recorder because that’s what people used in those days and he would record for example the first part of Beethoven’s symphony, so he would play that, two hands, and put it on the tape. Then he would write for your level. IF you were just starting out you might have a whole note and then a whole note and then something else and It might just be a little page of music, but it was something you could do at your level. So, you’d turn the tape on and you’d play your part, but it would be like you were playing with a symphony. So of course, that’s fun for anybody. You had to stay with the tape you would jump to the next measure if you fall out of lose your place. As you become more capable your part would get harder and harder. He tried to get people, especially children, to give him a rating on how they felt about the piece, so he knew if they were interested in more pop or classical music. So, he was giving them stuff that was more fun for them to do. He also gave really creative titles to make it more enjoyable. All of his students could read. We had reading sessions every week. We might read from published two hand parts but because he knew the scores really well, he’d add in the bass where it was doubled. But he also did a lot of arrangements for players and we would read through the two-part pieces. He did for example the complete swan lake ballet for four parts and it’s so much fun to play. It’s also on the manuscript and his manuscript is entirely legible.