IC News

Karel Husa was relaxing at his summer cottage on Cayuga Lake on August 20, 1968, when he turned on his transistor radio and heard some alarming news: Warsaw-Pact troops had just invaded his native Czechoslovakia, and thousands of troops and tanks were rolling into Prague.

As a composer, Husa responded the way he knew best — through music. As it happened, he had just received a commission to write a piece for the concert band at Ithaca College, where he had been appointed a lecturer of composition the year before. Distraught by what was happening in his home country, Husa spent the next six weeks composing what would become his best-known work — “Music for Prague 1968.”

After an initial performance on campus, the Ithaca College Concert Band premiered the four-movement piece at the Music Educators National Conference, Eastern Division, in Washington, D.C., on January 31, 1969. Within months, bands on college campuses across the country were playing it, and over the next 50 years, “Music for Prague 1968” would appear on concert programs more than 10,000 times.

“It was like an earthquake, because what I heard and what people heard was something that they had never heard in band music,” says Frank Battisti ’53, MS ’64, a friend of Husa’s who became the director of the New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble. “It changed the evolution of band and wind ensemble music from that point on.”

It was a fluke of history that Husa, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1969 for his “String Quartet No. 3,” even became a composer. After growing up in Prague, he decided to study engineering but was forced to abandon his plans when Hitler’s troops occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 and closed all the technical schools. Husa, who had played violin and piano as a child, enrolled in the Prague Conservatory, earned a doctorate in composition from the Prague Academy of Music, and then moved to Paris to study conducting with Eugene Bigot and Andre Cluytens.

In 1954, Husa arrived in Ithaca after he had been invited to Cornell for a position as instructor of music theory. He joined the faculty at IC as a lecturer in composition in 1967.

Dana Wilson, the retired Charles A. Dana Professor of Music, recalls that Husa brought a European touch to the School of Music at IC. “Karel was always dressed rather formally — always in a jacket and tie — and was very gracious to everyone,” says Wilson, who was on the faculty with Husa in the mid-1980s. “But beneath the genteel and polite exterior was a person of great depth and intensity. This was conveyed in this important work but also in most of his music.”

A year after Husa began teaching at IC, Kenneth Snapp, conductor of the concert band, commissioned him to write a piece for the ensemble. The composition would become his second work for band; his first was a concerto for saxophone commissioned in 1960 by Battisti when he was the band director at Ithaca High School.

While composing “Music for Prague 1968,” Husa used a range of sounds to reflect what he had heard over the radio on those two days in August: the piccolo solo opening the piece mimicked a bird call, symbolizing freedom. Clanging bells referred to Prague’s designation as the city of “Hundreds of Towers,” representing calls of distress and victory. The snare drum signified the troops marching in, and the trombone’s glissando recalled the military airplanes landing.

“You could tell with the drums and the military parts of it — you could almost feel the tanks in the invasion,” says Don Riale ’69, a trumpet player who performed in the world premiere. “It was a very powerful piece.”

The band members who rehearsed the piece with Husa quickly realized that “Music for Prague 1968” was not another John Philip Sousa march. Many were aware of the invasion and why Husa was deeply affected by it.

“He was just emotionally torn by what had happened in Prague, and he was a very sensitive man,” says Gary Rockwell ’69, the principal percussionist of the band at the time. “And we were in the ’60s and all the Vietnam stuff was going on too. It was like someone had thrown a hand grenade in the middle of our college education.”

After its unofficial premiere in Ford Auditorium on Dec. 13, 1968, a music review in The Ithaca Journal called the piece a major work that expressed a quest for freedom. “One left after this last work with a strong feeling that music as great as this should not be written about: one should only listen, and be deeply moved,” the reviewer wrote.

Six weeks later, the band embarked on a tour that began with a concert at Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, a blue-collar, working-class town. The next stop was a concert at the Elkton Senior High School in Cecil County, Maryland, where Riale, the trumpet player, had grown up.

The reaction of the audience gathered in the church was “very muted,” Riale recalls. “This is an area that was not particularly sophisticated musically. It was probably the kind of music that none of them had ever heard before — nothing even close. They did applaud at the performance, but it was very reserved.”

The reception at the Music Educators National Conference, which drew music teachers from elementary school to college, however, was overwhelming. Along with the band, Husa, who attended the premiere, received a standing ovation.

“It was incredibly well-received there,” Rockwell says. “It was a staggering performance, and the audience was very emotional.”

As clarinetist Karen (Dembow) Erler ’70 recalls, playing at the prestigious conference was an unforgettable experience. “It was really exciting because we put everything we had into it,” she says.