American composer Stephen Dembski (1949-2021) followed an unconventional path to becoming a sought-after composer of moving and beautiful tonal music. He learned piano at a young age and took up flute in elementary school. As a teenager, he played folk and rock music before becoming interested in jazz improvisation, and especially the music of Cecil Taylor, with whom he worked. After high school he undertook formal study in composition, supporting himself by working as an orderly in mental hospitals and as a tree surgeon while studying at Antioch. He then moved to New York, working as a record salesman studying composition with John Ronsheim and then Bülent Arel at SUNY-Stony Brook. He then went on to Princeton where he earned his M.F.A. and Ph.D. under the tutelage of Milton Babbitt. He credited his exposure early on to Euro-American concert music, Anglo-American folk music, and Afro-American improvisation (and especially his work with both Taylor and Babbitt) with bolstering the integration of neo-platonic formalism and abstract expressionism in his compositions.
Dembski’s music included instrumental, vocal, and electro-acoustic works as well as pieces for improvising musicians and interactive installations of sound and light. His honors included three commission-fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the Goddard Lieberson Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 35 years where he was a valued mentor-colleague of his music composition students.
During the past several years, Dembski was making music for a six-collaborator virtual reality project based on 478 of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell (presented first in Bangkok and Saigon, then in NYC and Madrid, and then Arles, where it spent the summer of 2018), setting the passionate, proto-feminist French words of 16th century Lyonnaise poet-courtesan Louise Labé with simultaneously-sung American English translation for a special event in May 2019 in New York. Also, through his work for the LaMama Experimental Theatre Company, he had been playing dramaturge and sound guy for a new Italian theatrical piece based on the letters between playwright Luigi Pirandello and actress Marta Abba (on stages in 2018-19 in Torino, Caserta, Modena, and Trapani, Sicily). He also served as improvising conductor of a long-form modular piece for about 30 improvising musicians in Bonn and Cologne in November of 2019.
