More Clues to a Life: The Alec Wilder Archive at the Eastman School of Music

Abstract

Alec Wilder (1907-1980) is one of a small number of composers who gained distinguished reputations from their concert music as well as their popular songs. His compositional output spans a continuum that contains popular songs, show tunes, art songs, and chamber music, including a multitude of solo works for winds. His concert music can sound Hindemithian in one measure and jazzy in the next. His popular songs, many of which follow neoclassical forms, contain melodies supported by lush extended harmonies. Wilder steadfastly refused to promote himself or his music, preferring instead to compose his literary and musical works as gifts for friends and musicians that he respected. He was almost entirely self-taught, and although he returned to his home town of Rochester, New York, to study privately at the Eastman School of Music, it is the unschooled, lyrical quality in Wilder's music that often dominates the more learned contrapuntal material. Out of rather eccentric habit, he never kept copies of his music or writings. Although a number of Wilder's chamber works and three collections of his songs are in print, much of his prose, poetry, and music remains unpublished. It is impossible to find his works in any one place, just when musicians and scholars are beginning to sense his importance. With the establishment in 1988 of the Alec Wilder Archive at the Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music, Wilder's works and ideas have become more accessible. This article will survey and describe the most important of the Archive's holdings; the contents of the Archive are listed in some detail in the appendix. Alec Wilder was profoundly literate; he was extremely well read, always seen with his latest favorite book stuffed in a pocket of his rumpled suit coat. For most of his life, he lived for extended periods in hotels in Rochester and New York City. He was a resident of the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street in Manhattan for fifty years in the midst of New York's literary higher echelon, though he published a relatively