Laurette Goldberg, Musician (1932 - 2005)

Laurette Canter Goldberg was born January 16, 1932 in Chicago, Illinois. At the age of four, she began her studies in music (piano) and began establishing a lifelong reputation as a high achiever and tenacious arts advocate. By the age of nine she received private study with a college music teacher from Saint Mary's College in South Bend Indiana, and at age of twelve, debuted with the college orchestra in a performance of Beethoven's piano concerto in C major.

At nineteen, Laurette's parents moved to Los Angeles as she remained in the Midwest and moved to Chicago. Working as a temporary switchboard operator, she saved money to enroll in music school and eventually earned a full scholarship to study at Chicago Musical College where she was instructed by Rudolf Ganz, among other teachers. She graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Music in 1953. During this period in her life, she was introduced to the sound of the instrument (through recordings) that would become her life's pursuit - the harpsichord.

In the 1950s, Wanda Landowska, Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould were popularizing the music of Bach. Landowska's eminence inspired Laurette to take up the harpsichord. An early Landowska retort became a rallying cry for Goldberg, "you play Bach your way, and I'll play it his way." Following undergraduate studies, she relocated to the Bay Area in 1953 and came in physical contact with a harpsichord for the very first time in Berkeley.

Goldberg enrolled in studies at Mills College with pianist Egon Petri (whose father conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra), and had association with many of the leading musical innovators of the day including Darius Milhaud, Luciano Berio, Leon Kirchner, Luigi Dallapiccola and Terry Riley. By the 1960s, she was teaching harpsichord at Mills College. (The school didn't actually own one. Students were required to meet at Goldberg's own home for lessons!)

Laurette met Solomon Goldberg in August of 1953, they married the following February, and settled in Oakland. That same year (1954) she enrolled at U.C. Berkeley where she continued her studies for one year before the birth of her first child. In 1956, Goldberg was offered an opportunity by Kurt Herbert Adler to be the preparatory pianist for the San Francisco Opera and Ballet. Her second child was born in 1958, prompting Goldberg to relinquish her post at the Opera and Ballet in order to be closer to her family. Ms. Goldberg continued her music in performing and accompanying posts with the Oakland Symphony and Chorus. Her work with the Oakland Symphony, and friendship with conductor Gerhard Samuel, encouraged her to order her first harpsichord in 1960.

Goldberg drove herself to Los Angeles periodically to study with Landowska's first pupil, Alice Ehlers, who was then on the faculty of U.S.C. In 1964, noted scholar and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick arrived at Berkeley. It was in Kirkpatrick that Laurette found her kindred spirit, musically. Kirkpatrick's expertise allowed her to probe the crucial questions and find the answers required to recreate music faithfully, in an historic sense.

Famed musician and educator Gustav Leonhardt came to Berkeley in the mid sixties for a three-week residency at the invitation of music professor Alan Curtis. Goldberg attended every lecture presented by Leonhardt, managing to secure a private lesson with the harpsichord legend. Referring to the historically informed music movement, in an extensive oral history given at the U.C. Berkeley Bancroft Library in 1996, Goldberg referred to Leonhardt as, "the center of it all." Although Laurette cared for three children and was separated from her first husband, she resolved to travel to Amsterdam to study with Leonhardt. A series of fourteen lessons with Leonhardt in his home began a long friendship with one of the seminal leaders of the early music movement. Other major influences on Laurette's philosophy and dedication to early music performance practice included Frans Bruggen, Anner Bylsma and Jaap Schroeder.

During her first sojourn to Holland, she had the opportunity to see and play vintage instruments in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum. She could scarcely have known that this experience would lead to the eventual founding of her own instrument collection, museum and school, Berkeley's MusicSources which Goldberg founded in 1986.

For several years, Goldberg directed the Junior Bach Festival as President. She retained a close association with the organization until her death, imparting an influence on the style and approach to teaching young people about Baroque performance practice, and helping to raise thousands of dollars to keep music training opportunities available to students of all backgrounds.

Among her greatest achievements is the founding in 1981 of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Laurette Goldberg acknowledged a handful of people as being present when she "got pregnant" with the idea to create a Baroque orchestra for the United States in the early 1980s. Gambist Susie Napper, Carlo Novi (violinist), Bruce Haynes (oboe), Janet See (flute), Carol Herman (viola da gamba), Eva La Gene (recorder), Robert and Kathy Strizich (lutenists), and Anna Carol Dudley (vocalist) were present at the very first discussion of the ensemble. All were on faculty at Cazadero, a summer music camp supported actively by Goldberg. She tapped growing relationships with key community members Peter Winkelstein (architect of the then new music building on the U.C. campus), Peter Strykers (physician and harpsichord student of Goldberg), Marie Collins (superior court judge and amateur recorder player), Judith Nelson (professional singer), Lee McRae (artist agent and early music scholar), Jane Stuppin (author and amateur musician), and Henry Mayer (high school headmaster and amateur recorder player). Other musicians were brought into the plan, including Michael Sand (violin), the first concertmaster for the new ensemble. It was to be known as Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of the West.

Goldberg's vision and tenacity can scarcely be overstated. Having gained popularity only in the 1950s, the historically-informed movement in music was slow to take hold in the United States. Her effort to start a full sized period instrument orchestra on the West Coast made it the first of its kind, at a time when only Canada's Tafelmusik was its rival. Goldberg and her musical associates created a performance series in Berkeley, San Francisco, Palo Alto and Los Angeles. The first recording was made, in addition to the completion of several successful regional tours.

Laurette Goldberg hand selected her successor in the Orchestra's fifth season, choosing Nicholas McGegan to become the first Music Director, a post he has held since 1985. During Nic's first year in the post, he was asked, "how do you relate to Laurette?" Goldberg fondly recalled that McGegan replied, "She is Queen Victoria, and I am her Disraeli." McGegan insisted that Goldberg continue as harpsichordist for Philharmonia during his first season as Music Director. Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra stands today as the largest orchestra of its kind in the United States, and the sixth largest orchestra of any kind in California. In three months, the Orchestra will launch its 25th anniversary season.

In 1986 Goldberg got "pregnant" for the last time with yet another original inspiration: MusicSources. MusicSources is a center for historical performance that includes a museum of early keyboard instruments, a library of documents pertaining to historically accurate performance practice, a school for teaching historical performance to students of all ages and a history garden where ancient species of flora are grown to help connect contemporary visitors with a context of the past. Goldberg's former student, confidant and artistic colleague, Gilbert Martinez began working with Laurette and MusicSources in 1998 and was tapped by its Board in 2004 to ensure the continuance and impact of the singular institution long into the future.

Goldberg is widely acknowledged as the most important pioneer for early music in the western United States. She attributed five critical ingredients to the foundation of the Bay Area as a center for early music in America - "you have to have people interested in the music, scholarship, [instrument] builders, teachers and performers," said Goldberg in her oral history. As a founding member of the San Francisco Early Music Society, her activism and stature drew leading harpsichord builders and technicians to the Bay Area where they remain essential contributors to a thriving early music community.

Goldberg was a former member of the board of Early Music America. She inaugurated many Baroque music activities in Jerusalem and installed the first replica harpsichord in the Middle East at Hebrew University. Laurette Goldberg wrote her own edition of Books I and II of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier in open score. These are published in hardcover by Medallion Guild and in paperback by MusicSources. She was a former advisor to American Bach Soloists and member of the early music touring ensemble, Tapestry. She also presented lectures and workshops, worldwide, throughout her career.

Goldberg's quest was inspired by her pivotal visit to study with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam in 1966. Of that experience, she said, "When I arrived at Leonhardt's house on January first or second, it was the beginning of a new life for me. All of a sudden, I knew I'd come to the only place I knew about where questions would be specifically answered." Laurette Goldberg made it her life's mission to nurture the questions and provide those answers to generations of musicians in North America, and specifically in the Bay Area. Her founding of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, MusicSources, SFEMS, and early music studies programs at organizations including the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Junior Bach Festival have put the Bay Area at the forefront of the early music movement in America.

Her guiding principle was a belief that "when we are all involved with historic music, we need to have a context." She believed that listeners needed to connect with "the now of then, the continuum of history, of which music is a major artifact."

Thousands of the nation's finest period-instrument performers consider Goldberg the most important pioneer in the quest to teach audiences to hear Baroque and Classical music in an authentic musical context. Her personal commitment and tireless work to expose listeners of all ages to the beauty of early music has affected the lives of millions of music lovers. In June 2004 Laurette Goldberg was awarded the Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music by Early Music America.

Commenting on Goldberg's life and legacy, Philharmonia violinist and San Francisco Conservatory early music specialist Anthony Martin said, "Laurette's most important work was with and for amateur musicians. She created the conditions for professionals to find both employment and an informed audience. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra fans that fill First Congregational Church twice in a weekend are there because of the ceaseless educational efforts that Laurette expended in the Bay Area over the past four decades, through her teaching, both private and at Cal and the Conservatory, through the organizations she influenced or established, such as Junior Bach and SFEMS and MusicSources, through her constant matching of ideas to people who could realize them. When we think of the founding board members of Philharmonia, we think of, to pick a few, an historian (Henry Mayer), a judge (Marie Collins), a physician (Peter Strykers), a writer (Jane Stuppin). Let us not forget that Laurette also knew them as recorder players and harpsichordists and gambists, people who practiced in their spare time, and purchased instruments for their homes, who met in small groups to play chamber music in living rooms, and now and again to be coached by her. These are the people she later ignited with her enthusiasm for creating, out of nothing save her own imagination, an orchestra so that she could hear the larger works by the masters she felt were being ill-served by existing musical organizations. She had a vision of the Bay Area as a world center for Early Music, thus our lives today are in fact the realization her vision. I recall what she said last month at a special event for MusicSources in her honor, "You people exist so that my dreams can come true."

A survivor of diabetes and heart bypass surgery in 1997, Goldberg died on Sunday, April 3 at the age of 73 from a stroke brought on by complications during a routine surgical procedure at Alta Bates in Berkeley.

She is survived by three children, Daniel (49), Ron (47), and Raquel (44); nine grandchildren; and her second husband, Alan Compher -- her soul mate for the past 35 years.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice

By Michelle Dulak Thomson

It's conventional to say that the death of a great person leaves an unfillable hole. Laurette Goldberg's death last April certainly did that; but it can't be said that she left nothing to fill it. Thursday's tribute concert at First Congregational Church, Berkeley gave its audience both a fair idea of what we lost by her death, and a better idea what we gained by her life.

For me, coming late both to the Early Music scene and to the Bay Area version of it, the first impression was that Laurette Goldberg somehow had managed to get a finger in every pie; it took awhile for me to understand that she had baked rather more than half the pies herself. Thursday's tribute concert deliberately sent, as it were, emissaries from programs and institutions she had touched and in many cases founded: from Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, from MusicSources, from the Junior Bach Festival, from the San Francisco Conservatory's historical-performance program. The sheer scope of her activities became clearer to me than it ever had been.

The spoken tributes were as full of humor as of tender regard. Anthony Martin, who runs the Conservatory's baroque ensemble and also is one of Philharmonia's rotating principals, led off. I think it was the composer Elinor Armer (also on the Conservatory faculty), though, who mentioned that Goldberg's Conservatory studio had, perhaps inevitably, been dubbed the "Den of Antiquity." Gilbert Martinez, now artistic director of MusicSources, recounted having heard the young Philharmonia on tour in his native Bakersfield in the early 80s, and being smitten by the sound. (It's more or less impossible to imagine Philharmonia today going on tour to Bakersfield, which is not necessarily a good thing; but that's a topic for another day.) Nicholas McGegan recounted how he came to become Music Director of Philharmonia, some twenty years ago. And a charming short biographical film (Laurette Goldberg baby pictures? good heavens) by Bernard Gauweiler preceded everything but Martin's opening remarks.

A gathering of ambassadors

On the musical side it was, again, a gathering of ambassadors. For the Junior Bach Festival -- which Goldberg did her best to turn in a historical-performance direction -- there was 17-year-old recorder player Andrew Newbery Levy, playing the Allemande of Bach's solo-flute Partita, eloquently if not without a few strange hesitations that seemed to owe nothing either to phrasing or to the need to breathe. Martinez played the intricate Allemande of the D-major keyboard Partita, saying beforehand that Goldberg had once asked that it be played at her memorial service. It's hard to think of a piece more apt, and his was a tender and rather beautiful performance.

Next came soprano Judith Nelson -- who had worked with Goldberg in chamber repertoire, as a member of the Elizabethan Trio and of Tapestry, long before Philharmonia was a gleam in anyone's eye. Her contribution was Purcell's An Evening Hymn, richly and expressively sung, with McGegan and cellist Farley Pearce in deft accompaniment.

And then Philharmonia was broken out. First for the Bach (basically transcribed Vivaldi, as Nic cheerfully explained) four- harpsichord Concerto, and then for the third Orchestral Suite. The concerto benefited, I'd guess, directly and indirectly from Goldberg's legacy. One of the four instruments, we were told, was by John Phillips; another by Kevin Fryer. Whether either was from the MusicSources collection I don't know; but I doubt that two such excellent makers would be working from the Bay Area were it not for the magnificent Bay Area early-music community that Goldberg helped build. The players were Davitt Moroney, Martinez, Katherine Roberts Perl, and Kathleen McIntosh, and in aggregate they made a fine ear-tickling noise, supported well though deferentially by the Philharmonia players. As for the Suite, it was brilliant (via the brass) and elegant (via concertmaster Kati Kyme's seemingly effortless trek through the opening Ouverture), and spirited (via McGegan, as full of energy as ever), and a fine tribute to one who spent her life promoting brilliant, elegant, spirited Bach. Thanks to those who put this concert together; it made clearer than any number of verbal tributes could do what Laurette Goldberg did for music in the Bay Area. To paraphrase Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: If you seek her monument, just look around you. Or, rather, listen.

(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)

©2005 Michelle Dulak Thomson, all rights reserved

Site constructed by Alan Compher, Laurette Goldberg's widower
alanbc@humboldt1.com, msources@lmi.net
Revised 30 June, 16 July, 12 August, 6 October 2005; 23 January, 10 October, 9 November 2006

We maintained two homes. One in Berkeley houses MusicSources  -- the Center for Historically Informed Performance. The other is 280 miles north at the mouth of the Mad River. We shared our lives with two purebred Burmese and a Maine Coon mix that enjoy travel and fine living -- Josh and PaulaPiano were always with Laurette and Mosh was always with me. When we were together all five of us slept in the same bed.
 

• Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra
• San Francisco Conservatory of Music
• American Bach Soloists
• Early Music America
• Junior Bach
• Cazadero Music Camp
• San Francisco Early Music Society
• MusicSources (Center for Historically Informed Performance, Inc.)

Alan, Josh, and Mosh are now working long hours on Laurette's pictorial biography. We are sifting through more than 3,000 photos, 100 hours of video, and tens of thousands of pages of notes and lectures (not to mention the cards and letters) Laurette left us to work on. We will keep Laurette's friends posted on our progress through this web site and another, larger one, where we hope to show video clips.