NEC Mourns the Death of Faculty Pianist, Chamber Music Coach Patricia Zander
Patricia Zander
For Immediate Release:
July 23, 2008
New England Conservatory is mourning the death yesterday (July 22) of pianist and chamber music coach Patricia Zander, 66, who had taught at NEC since 1972. She died at Youville Hospital in Cambridge after battling cancer for many years. She continued to teach through the 2007-08 academic year, maintaining a studio of 10 students. Too ill to come to NEC, she taught at home—with some lessons reportedly lasting as long as four hours. She insisted that while she taught her intense focus on music distracted her from pain.
“Patricia was simply extraordinary as a musician, as a teacher and as a human being,” said NEC President Tony Woodcock. “To be around her was to feel the inspiration and passion of music which just emanated from her whole personality. The fact that she taught right to the very end was a manifestation not just of her commitment and love of her students but her immense courage as well.”
“Patricia Zander offered a model of what a musician, an artist, and a human can be,” said Bruce Brubaker, chair of NEC’s Piano Department. “The scope and nuanced subtlety of her perception and the enormity of her interest filled us all with the best aspirations. When she pronounced the word ‘inamorata,’ lingering on the vowels, I knew that ‘love’ was the only word that could describe what she felt, for life, for the world filled with ideas and emotions – love for everything around her.”
Born Patricia Tolman, the daughter of a gardener and a cleaning woman at a stately home in Dorset, England, she trained at the Royal College of Music in London, where her teacher was Cyril Smith and where she won the highly regarded Dannreuther Prize for best concerto performance. She went on to advanced studies in France with Vlado Perlemuter and Nadia Boulanger, and in America with Leonard Shure. A musician’s musician, Zander was an elegant and profoundly eloquent performer whether as soloist or collaborative pianist. Beyond that, she was what former Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer called a “kind of lodestar for Boston's musical community and probably the most influential music teacher in the city.”
As a soloist and chamber musician, Zander performed throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Korea and recorded with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. She coached lieder and opera and presented piano masterclasses in China and Japan. She also served as coordinator of the chamber music program of the Round Top Festival in Texas. Before coming to NEC (she initially taught in the chamber music department and then was appointed to the piano faculty in 1976), she served on the faculty of Harvard University.
As a teacher, Zander exerted a profound influence on many musicians—not only her piano students but string players and others whom she mentored and accompanied. Indeed, the list of students who worked with her is a catalogue of brilliant, individual, searching performers including Ma, Stephen Drury, Max Levinson, Stefan Jackiw, Sanford Sylvan, David Breitman, Irina Muresanu, Itamar Golan, Judith Gordon, and Sarah Bob. Partnering with her former husband Benjamin Zander and other NEC faculty, she was part of a team that helped mold the careers and sensibilities of several exceptionally gifted young musicians, including Ma and Jackiw.
While he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, Ma used to spend Thursday evenings at Patricia Zander’s house, playing music that ranged far beyond the cello literature. After he became an international star, Ma invited her to concertize with him. The two toured for about a dozen years and also recorded together.
“Everything she did, she played with such laser-like intensity and razor sharp characterization,” Ma recalled in a recent phone call. “She made music leap off the page. She inhabited the many rooms in the mansion of music and was very comfortable in all of them.”
Like the best teachers, Zander was known for helping students develop and express their individual personalities through music. “She never imposed her viewpoint,” said NEC faculty member Stephen Drury, who studied with her at Harvard in the seventies, at NEC as an Artist Diploma candidate in the 1980s, and “all the time after that in one way or another. She was phenomenally attentive to what was coming out when I played and served as a model for what I should have been attentive to. She was always hearing what I wanted to hear but I didn’t know I wanted to hear it.”
“She was supportive, illuminative, uncompromising and liberating,” Dyer said. “She taught, as she played, with knowledge and spontaneity, instinct, experience, generosity of feeling, and profound insight.”
“I loved working with Patricia because she realizes that the important things about music are not mutable,” said collaborative pianist and former student Judith Gordon in a 1998 Boston Globe interview. “The search for color, for sound, for pianistic grace, is ongoing, whether you are playing a Rachmaninoff Etude or a piano reduction of the accompaniment to a Haydn Cello Concerto.”
Articulate, widely read, and deeply familiar with all the arts, Zander had grown up in a household without books or much formal education. “She was the original autodidact,” Drury said. “From her father she learned about cultivation and she cultivated herself. She was completely self-made and she encouraged all of us through her example to create ourselves.”
As a result of her identification with the highest artistic standards and her tart candor, Zander was often consulted on important matters at the Conservatory. She served on the committee that recommended nominees for honorary degrees and, most recently, she was a member of the Presidential Search Committee that chose Tony Woodcock to succeed the late Daniel Steiner. Those who worked with her on those committees could always be certain she would speak her mind with frankness, discernment, and sometimes devastating wit.
Never one to seek celebrity, Zander was a “mythic figure among musicians even if she was not known by the general public,” said Ben Zander. “Her students were always the most important thing to her,” said her daughter Jessica. “They were what kept her going. The hardest thing to face about death was leaving them behind.”
For Zander, teaching and making music were clearly at the pinnacle of life’s satisfactions. Drury put it simply: “She was happy.”
In lieu of funeral services, friends and former students are encouraged to celebrate "PZ" at a memorial tribute to be held at NEC in the fall with details to be announced shortly.
For further information and an audio clip of Patricia Zander, check the NEC Website
ABOUT NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY
Recognized nationally and internationally as a leader among music schools, New England Conservatory offers rigorous training in an intimate, nurturing community to 750 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral music students from around the world. Its faculty of 225 boasts internationally esteemed artist-teachers and scholars. Its alumni go on to fill orchestra chairs, concert hall stages, jazz clubs, recording studios, and arts management positions worldwide. Nearly half of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is composed of NEC trained musicians and faculty.
The oldest independent school of music in the United States, NEC was founded in 1867 by Eben Tourjee. Its curriculum is remarkable for its wide range of styles and traditions. On the college level, it features training in classical, jazz, Contemporary Improvisation, world and early music. Through its Preparatory School, School of Continuing Education, and Community Collaboration Programs, it provides training and performance opportunities for children, pre-college students, adults, and seniors. Through its outreach projects, it allows young musicians to engage with non-traditional audiences in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes—thereby bringing pleasure to new listeners and enlarging the universe for classical music and jazz.
NEC presents more than 600 free concerts each year, many of them in Jordan Hall, its world- renowned, 100-year old, beautifully restored concert hall. These programs range from solo recitals to chamber music to orchestral programs to jazz and opera scenes. Every year, NEC’s opera studies department also presents two fully staged opera productions at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston.
NEC is co-founder and educational partner of “From the Top,” a weekly radio program that celebrates outstanding young classical musicians from the entire country. With its broadcast home in Jordan Hall, the show is now carried by National Public Radio and is heard on 250 stations throughout the United States.
Contact: Ellen Pfeifer
Public Relations Manager
New England Conservatory
617-585-1143
epfeifer@newenglandconservatory.edu