Joseph Fennimore

Early life and education

Joseph Fennimore was born in Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. He began formal music studies in upstate New York at the Schenectady Conservatory of Music, his principal teacher being its founder and director, Joseph G. Derrick, graduate of the New England Conservatory in the piano class of Ethel Newcomb, Theodor Leschetizky’s first American assistant. In his twelfth year Fennimore was chosen to perform a piano concerto with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra at that city’s historic Proctor’s Theater. The first Fennimore compositions to be performed publicly were choral works presented in 1957 by the Scotia-Glenville Choralaires, under Carl M. Steubing, which annually toured the northeast.

Fennimore was one of eight high school juniors to participate in the Eastman School of Music’s experimental accelerated program in Rochester, New York, during which the first year of his baccalaureate was completed over the summer months before and after his senior year in high school. The first summer he studied piano with guest teacher Eugene List; the second summer he studied with Eastman piano chair Cecile Genhart, who would become one of his chief musical influences. It was in the fall of 1958 that Fennimore met fellow Eastman freshman, the pianist Gordon Hibberd, who has been his life partner ever since.

Genhart arranged summer piano studies for Fennimore with retired Eastman faculty member Sandor Vas; Vas enlisted Hildegarde Lasell Watson to become Fennimore’s patron; in 1962 she arranged Fennimore’s visit to and audition for composer and critic Virgil Thomson, who urged him to move to New York City. Upon graduating from Eastman that year with a B.M. degree with distinction and a performer’s certificate, Fennimore entered the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan that autumn as a student of Rosina Lhévinne, receiving an M.S. degree from Juilliard in 1965 with the Loeb and Van Cliburn Alumnae Awards.

Career

Fennimore, an ASCAP composer, at first interspersed composing with other musical activities ranging from performing as concert and recital soloist (encouraged by Bedford Pace III, director of public relations in North America for the British Tourist Authority) in America, Japan and Europe, to assistant conducting on Broadway for music director and arranger Buster Davis, writing music criticism pseudonymously and co-founding, with Gordon Hibberd, and directing (1972–76) the Hear America First concert series that was broadcast nationally on National Public Radio. He also taught piano at Princeton University as well as piano, piano literature and music literature at the College of St. Rose in Albany, New York. Since the early 1970s he has devoted his energies more exclusively to his compositional efforts, new works introduced and often performed by mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle, cellist Ted Hoyle, harpsichordist Elaine Comparone and pianists Larry Graham, Dennis Helmrich, Jeffrey Middleton, Dan Teitler, Marthanne Verbit and Juana Zayas.

Honors and awards

Among Fennimore’s citations are the Loeb Memorial Award and Van Cliburn Award (both from Juilliard for post-graduate study); the Hour of Music Award from the Colony Club of New York, which he won in 1964; and first prize in piano in the National Federation of Music Club’s Young Artist Competition in 1965. This last award brought Fennimore four years of management from the federation, which included a United States Information Agency-sponsored tour of Japan and dozens of concerts throughout the United States, especially in the south, where he received the Kentucky Colonel and Arkansas Traveler awards from the governors of those states. He also received a Rockefeller grant (with renewal); a Fulbright grant (with renewal) in 1967-69, which enabled him to study with Harold Craxton, O.B.E., in the United Kingdom; and first prize in Barcelona’s Concurso Internacional Maria Canals in 1969. In addition, since 1976 he has been recipient of annual ASCAP awards. In 2013 Fennimore received a citation from the New York State Music Teachers Association recognizing his "outstanding contributions as a performer, master teacher, coach and world-renowned performer."

Personal life

Long maintaining one home in Manhattan and another in upstate New York, Fennimore and Gordon Hibberd were among the first tenants at the landmark Westbeth Artists Community Housing in Greenwich Village. They currently reside in Albany.

Compositional overview

Fennimore’s music, especially that featuring the keyboard, is often of a technical sophistication and chromatic complexity that stretch the Western tonal tradition it rises from; such exotica as Cathay and Sea of Sand, evoking Chinese and Middle Eastern idioms respectively, similarly expand on it in a “continual metamorphosis” of his style. At the same time, his reworkings of Schumann’s A-minor sonata for violin and piano and Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto (premiered in 1986 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under James Levine) remain loyally romantic. Beyond a nostalgic or “bittersweet” lyricism often commented on, an additional distinguishing component of Fennimore’s style is an elevated wittiness and “seriously playful sport” exemplified by his satiric take on language instruction, the song cycle Berlitz: Introduction to French, and Foxtrot, a fanciful tribute to bygone popular musical genres.

Opera

Orchestral

Chamber works

Piano solo

Piano, four hands

Two pianos

Choral works

Song cycles or groups

Transcriptions and arrangements