By Michele Alperin, Special Writer
At 8 years old, Moshe Budmor started composing holiday songs for his classmates in pre-Israel Palestine and has never stopped.
Even though he worries that one day the faucet may go dry, it hasn’t happened yet, and he will be sharing work mostly from the past year at a concert celebrating his 90th birthday, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 15, at the Bristol Chapel on the Westminster Choir College campus, 101 Walnut Lane, Princeton.
His friends and the entire Princeton community are invited.
”I write the music because I need to write it,” he says. “That’s what I do, and I’m old, and I’m not going to last forever, and I want to share it with my friends and with the community.”
Mr. Budmor’s life as a musician started before his birth, he says, through the efforts of his tone-deaf mother, who, dreaming of a musical son, attended every concert in his hometown of Hamburg, Germany, during her pregnancy.
Not only was he musical as a small child, but he also was a performer. One family story has him wandering around a beach where people protected themselves from the wind by digging holes or building walls around themselves. Standing on a mini-hillock and referring to himself in the third person, Mr. Budmor, then 3, would ask people he didn’t know, “Should he roll down?” When they gave him permission, he would do so, then stand up and ask, “Should he sing?” And these were the first performances of a little boy who would grow up to be a composer, conductor, musician, and music professor at Trenton State College, now the College of New Jersey.
A timid child who never asked for anything, Mr. Budmor remembers asking his grandparents to buy him a harmonica when he was nearly 5. The one they bought, though, could only play songs in C major, without any flats or sharps, and he says he became terribly frustrated. Thinking the fault was the harmonica’s, he asked his grandmother to write and ask his parents, who were visiting Paris, to buy him a better one. They found one that would do sharps and flats, but alas not chords. So, finally, they gave up and bought him a recorder. And when he was a little older, he began studying the violin.
When he was 5 or 6, Mr. Budmor started his musical education in a class where a piano teacher taught the children to read music and did basic ear training with them.
”Most of the children were 11 or 12,” he recalls. “It added a lot to my self-confidence because I was always the best.”
In 1932, his life changed. His father, a progressive and a Zionist who ran a furniture factory, died suddenly, and within two months, his mother moved 8-year-old Mr. Budmor and his two younger sisters to Tel Aviv, where she built an apartment building and purchased an orange grove, whose proceeds supported her family.
His mother gave him some early advice that stuck with him.
”My mother told me,” he says, “‘It doesn’t matter if you get bad grades in school, as long as you pass, but you have to be great in one thing.”
The transition to Palestine was difficult for Mr. Budmor, who acted out in school. Then, four years after their arrival, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he and his sisters were separated. He went to “very Prussian” friends of his mother’s whom she thought would be able to give him the discipline he needed and supply a father figure. Their “do it because I said so” attitude didn’t go down well with him, although he did know they loved him.
In school, however, he remembers rebelling at every moment and also manipulating his teachers by playing the orphan card, so he never got into serious trouble.
After 10th grade Mr. Budmor quit high school so that he could study full time at the Academy of Music while getting a high school equivalency degree on the side.
Mr. Budmor, however, felt very uncomfortable studying music at the academy when, in 1940, Hitler’s troops entered Africa. He wanted to join the Jewish Brigade, but, because his foster parents would not give their permission, he went instead to a border kibbutz, where he fell in love with the kibbutz’s communal philosophy.
A year or so later he joined Kibbutz Hulata, where he was a member for 12 years. Starting out as a fisherman, he switched after a couple of years to being a shepherd to protect his hands for the violin. On the kibbutz he organized a choir that was his first experience conducting amateurs and non-musicians.
”I had to teach everything by rote,” he recalls, “and I had to be very patient, which I wasn’t when I was young.”
In 1950 the kibbutz gave him leave to study choral conducting at Juilliard in New York City. One summer during his studies he had a scholarship in choral conducting at Tanglewood, where he observed something that affected him deeply — a choral conductor who was unable to control the Boston Symphony.
”This great choral conductor could not handle an orchestra, and we stood there and saw the orchestra behaving like naughty children, throwing spitballs, during rehearsal,” says Mr. Budmor. In the wake of this experience he stayed another year at Juilliard to earn a graduate diploma in orchestral conducting.
Back in Israel, Mr. Budmor got a job as music director of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra, but returned to the United States in 1958, so that his wife could retain her U.S. citizenship. He looked for a job as a conductor, but was only able to get some part-time gigs, one at the Bronx Symphony Orchestras.
Finally he found an interested employer at the Sarasota Orchestra, but lost the opportunity because he did not have the formal bachelor’s and master’s degrees he would need to teach at the local junior college. He was told, simply, “Even Beethoven couldn’t teach here if he applied.”
This experience sent him back to Columbia Teachers College, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education and a doctorate in composition. With his coursework done, he started applying for jobs but kept getting rejected. He sought advice from a more successful friend, who told him not to say too much: “If they call you for an interview, it means they like what they see and you can only spoil it through talking,” his friend said. “If you let them talk, they feel that they had a wonderful conversation.” Lo and behold, Mr. Budmor was hired on the spot as an associate professor at Trenton State College.
He varied his teaching style, very demanding with music majors, but easier when his goal was to share his love of classical music. He always attended the weekly student recitals, but would never respond to questions immediately after their performances.
”I always used to say — and it was also part of my philosophy — ‘You are my student, you deserve the truth, and right now after playing you are very vulnerable. Come tomorrow, and we’ll talk about your playing.’”
All of Mr. Budmor’s composing begins with the germ of an idea. For his upcoming concert, for example, a piece celebrating Princetonian Faye Abelson’s 90th birthday was based on a translation of the letters in her nickname into musical notes and a piano piece dedicated to his late wife grew out of his feelings for her.
But the germ is only the beginning of the creative process. “What interests me is when there is an idea; how to develop an idea; how out of an idea grows a whole piece,” says Mr. Budmor. “I still don’t understand the process; when I see a finished piece, I always ask, ‘Did I write it?’”
Moshe Budmor’s 90th birthday concert will be held at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, June 15, at the Bristol Chapel on the Westminster Choir College campus, 101 Walnut Lane, Princeton. The concert is free and open to the public. For more: Sandy Sussman at 609-921-7334 or ssussman@princeton.edu
