Stephen Jaffe, Mary D. B. T. and James H. Semans Distinguished Professor of Music Composition, joined the Duke Music faculty in 1981. He has served as the Chair of the department on numerous occasions and has been instrumental in the growth of the Composition program for both undergraduate and graduate students.
I flew to Duke for an interview in May 1981 from Rome, where I had spent the year on a Rome Prize Fellowship and where I had just performed the solo piano part in my composition called ARCH. Fenner Douglass, Music’s Chair, had offered me a one-year position, which I was disinclined to accept, so on short notice Pan Am transported me to Durham to interview for a three-year position. On the flight over I was encouraged by a fellow passenger, an Italian mystic who was an expert on the interpretation of dreams and Etruscan objects. Hearing ancient cymbals in my Partita for cello, piano and percussion, he predicted great things for me… at Duke.
On campus I met Giorgio Ciompi, Allan Bone, Marian Turner, Mary D.B.T. Semans and many others; at the interview we talked about concentric circles — ways for the faculty and curriculum to integrate contemporary music more fully. Imagine what has grown from that initial meeting! — teaching, supported artistic work, stability to raise a beautiful family, great colleagues, students and audiences with whom I have been able to share musical gifts.
There wasn’t a focus on contemporary music in 1981 and the faculty were interested in appointing an energetic young colleague to succeed Iain Hamilton and Robert Ward, who was then on the faculty in a half-time role. My vision was to initiate a concert series called Encounters: with the Music of Our Time. Encounters ran most strongly from 1982 until 2012 or so (we still use the name) presenting literally hundreds of new works annually and bringing some of music’s most important composers and performers to campus.
With the addition of the Ph.D. program in Composition, growing needs and program quality required a model more reliant on professional quality recordings made by visiting ensembles, gradually phased in with the support of the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. The renovation of Baldwin Auditorium in 2012 allowed graduate students to emerge from rigorous studies with CD quality recordings made by such groups as Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, JACK Quartet, the North Carolina Symphony and others.
It has been a great pleasure to teach among such wonderful colleagues whose work I admire, such as Scott Lindroth, John Supko and Anthony Kelley, among many other members of the faculty — and what students! They now come to Duke to study from all over the world, including China, Brazil, Italy, Japan, South Africa and Iran. The concentric circles imagined at my 1981 interview have indeed overlapped in manifold ways.