The American musician Jack Gottlieb (1930-2011) thought of himself primarily as a composer, and wished to be remembered first for his own music. But it was as assistant to the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein that he made the greatest impact, and, at his last public appearance at the Library of Congress in Washington he admitted wryly that Bernstein, who died in 1990, was still part of his DNA. His book Working with Bernstein was published in 2010, but is by far the most valuable Bernstein memoir and will surely remain so, both for its candour and its musical insights.
In the 1950s, he studied musical comedy with Bernstein at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Bernstein's compositional methods in A Study of Melodic Manipulations (1964) – an analysis that has not been bettered. And he compiled a comprehensive catalogue of Bernstein's compositions, music writings, recordings and television features, known as the Red Book.
Gottlieb was born and grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and as a boy played the clarinet in marching bands. The study of Jewish music became a passion when he attended a summer school, led by the dynamic synagogue composer Max Helfman. He took a music degree at Queens College, New York, and later studied for a master's at the Brandeis campus, where his composition teacher was Irving Fine.
Gottlieb fell under the spell of the charismatic Bernstein, 12 years his senior, and became his assistant in 1958 when Bernstein assumed the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic.
Eventually, Gottlieb left in 1966 to teach, and for three years to serve as music director of Temple Israel school in St Louis, Missouri. More teaching followed in New York at the Hebrew Union College, where in 1975 he became the first director of the college's school of sacred music. But in 1977 he returned to the Bernstein fold, becoming his director of publications.
In the meantime Gottlieb was amassing a considerable catalogue of compositions with a strong emphasis on music for the synagogue. There was an ecumenical thrust, too. In 1967 his sacred service Love Songs for Sabbath was sung in a Catholic church in St Paul, Minnesota, and a similar impulse in 2000 saw other liturgical music performed.
