This article captures parts of multiple interviews conducted by Sheila Herrling and René Johnson with Paul and Lex Rozin, son and grandson of composer Albert Rozin, and includes historical information shared by Deborah Tannen, niece of Albert Rozin. It is a delightful story of happenstance, fueled by curiosity and the power of human connection to write back into history a man whose story and accomplishments are worth telling.
Sheila: Hello, Paul! What an absolute treat it is for us to meet you.
Paul (son): Well, I feel the same. I am just so tickled by the fact that you are interested in my father and his work. I keep thinking I am going to pull something together about him. I have so many things but haven’t done it. This is inspiring me.
René: Can you believe that we found you from a 1940 U.S. Census document? We crossed our fingers that Dr. Paul Rozin, the UPenn Psychology Professor playfully called “Doctor of Disgust,” was, in fact, the son of Albert Rozin, the composer. And it was you!
Paul: Quite the sleuthing! Yes, I didn’t carry on the musical tradition, I’m afraid. My kids did though. All three are very talented in the arts.
René: Are you surprised by the fact that there is so little public biographical information about your father, considering the renown of The Little Concerto?
Paul: Well, I assume the lives and works of many extremely talented people have not been documented. My dad was, well, my dad. He taught piano mostly to beginners and was the organist and choirmaster for the Reformed Jewish Synagogue, Beth Sholom-People’s Temple in Brooklyn. I believe he was also a composition judge from time to time.
Sheila: Tell us more about him. Bring him to life for us.
Paul: My father was a gentle, kind man, with a great sense of humor. He was a great joke teller and would often be asked to emcee events. He loved music. He loved teaching music. He especially loved teaching children and finding creative ways to keep them interested and improving. Tchaikovsky was his favorite composer. In my home, we had a grand piano, which I still have, and a small organ. We would have people over to sing and play music. My mother was a dancer and an artist, and my father was a musician. Their income came mostly from my father teaching piano. They didn’t make much money, but they had a rich and interesting life.
Sheila: Tell us more about your mother and how your parents met.
Paul: My parents met at a dancing school in Brooklyn. My mother, Rosanne, was a dancer and ran a dance studio. She needed a pianist to play, and my father showed up for the job. She was very talented. She was also an artist. She painted and made artistic masks. She was also a self-proclaimed Communist and was quite active politically, whereas my father was not politically active. His life was centered in music. If he wasn’t teaching or entertaining people in his home, he would be perfectly content lying in bed listening to music.
Sheila: It sounds like he really cared about bringing people into his home and into your lives, sharing music, storytelling, and building community.
Paul: He did care. He felt like everyone should be exposed to music and given the opportunity to learn to play music. He wrote a wonderful article, “The Case of the Piano Dropout,” in which he discusses his love of music and his approach to teaching. He talks about accompanying his father to concerts, operas, and his own rehearsals where he would soak up Chaliapin, Rachmaninoff, and Gabrilowitch. Can you imagine?!
René: Amazing! Tell us more about your father’s early years. A little digging on my part into genealogical records shows he was born in Russia and emigrated to the U.S. as a young boy. What was interesting was that Albert’s naturalization petition, his draft card, and the 1940 and 1950 U.S. Census records all had different birth dates and years.
Paul: My father was born in Russia, in what is now Belarus. He wasn’t sure what his exact birthday was, but we always celebrated it on June 15. When he died in 1987, we said he was 80 years old, making his birth year 1907. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1923 at the age of 14. Life was very hard in Russia. Civil war during the Bolshevik reign led to food shortages, economic distress, and revolts. People were dying of starvation, and Jews were rounded up in pogroms. America was the place to go. His father, uncle, and two older siblings emigrated to America first. His mother followed several years later with the three youngest children, including my father, Albert.
Sheila: We spoke with your cousin, Deborah Tannen. (Dorothy, her mother, was Albert’s sister.) She provided details to your father’s (Albert’s) emigration story–quite a harrowing tale. As she related it, Albert’s father and brother sent money to pay a smuggler to get them across the Russian border to Poland. The first smuggler stole their money; the second attempt was successful but dramatic. They hid in a horse-drawn carriage, traveling by night through the cold and snowy woods. At one point, Albert’s mother had to walk alongside the carriage in the snow and lost her shoe, but they couldn’t stop to find it, so she walked barefoot the rest of the way, arriving in Poland with terribly frostbitten toes. New U.S. immigration quotas in the U.S. kept them in Poland for a year and a half before traveling to Belgium and finally arriving in the United States, just before more extreme immigration laws embodied in The Johnson-Reed Act were enacted.
Paul: Yes, she just recently shared those details with me. She really is the historian of our family.
René: Ok, so the family is reunited in Brooklyn in 1923. How are they making a living?
Paul: My grandfather had been a French Horn player in the Russian Symphony Orchestra. In New York, he played in a silent film orchestra.
René: That’s interesting, because we know that your father took organ lessons with Jesse Crawford who was quite a famous organist known for accompanying silent films. Do you think your grandfather made that connection?
Paul: I don’t know that for certain, but the timing makes sense.
René: Let’s turn to your father’s music. Albert composed a lot of music!
Paul: Oh, he wrote hundreds of pieces of children's music. He loved writing pieces for his students. He wrote music for both children and adults, and also religious music for piano and organ. My youngest son Lex is a professor of music theory and analysis and is probably better suited to talk about the quality of my dad’s music.
Lex (son of Paul; grandson of Albert): He wrote mostly short pieces for kids that are fun to play and rhythmically active, and have programmatic content and imagery associated with it, all with fun titles that are engaging for kids. He has a small set of “adult” pieces, and I think they’re quite good. There’s a romantic quality, and some of them verge on that early 20th century style. They’re lovely–similar to Chopin or Debussy in style. There are individual moments that are absolutely gorgeous and really open up possibilities for the pianist to enjoy and connect with the music.
Sheila: Composers are often asked where their inspiration for their music came from. Do you know what inspired Albert?
Paul: How did a melody come into his mind? I think probably most composers can’t tell you. I certainly don’t know that about my father. He was very good at creating melody, as was Tchaikovsky. But I don’t know how those melodies came into his head. Lex, there must be information about famous composers when they’re asked questions like this and they probably say, “I don’t know.”
Lex: It depends what you're asking about. I ask this question of my students every single week at my composition seminar, because I’m the non-composer there, and what composers are interested in is not “How did you come up with such a beautiful melody?” They’re interested in “What are the materials you used?”, or “What was the process you went through?” I think it’s Schoenberg who said something like, “It was a gift from God, and then I had to work it over.”
Sheila: Well it is clear from some of the old articles you have shared that he was a teacher at heart, a self-described “educational composer.” That he used titles as a way to engage his students.
Paul: Yes. He used titles as a gateway to both mastering technique and finding joy in playing. He knew his students and composed music around titles that were engaging and delightful to his students in addition to providing teaching opportunities.
René: A quick glance through his titles gives a sense of his creativity: Falling Leaves; Rush Hour in Rio; Waltz of the Winds; Circus Parade; Hurricane Hilda. These titles, unlike many titled pieces assigned to students (think Canon in D, Sonata No. 14, or Prelude No. 1 in C Major) draw the student in – make them curious to hear how it sounds. By mastering the piece, they also master the technique he put into it. It’s really quite brilliant!
René: I wonder if the people he dedicated his music to played a role on the inspiration front. He dedicated his pieces to you and your mother, family members, and a host of others. Did these people inspire the music, or did he just like to honor them with dedications?
Paul: Yes, many of his pieces had dedications. I don’t know them all. Many are family, as you said, including a piece to each of my children, nieces, and nephews. He dedicated music to his doctors and his dentist. He also wrote music for some of the singers and musicians he worked with at the synagogue, his neighbors, his friends (including Sam Levinson, a popular Jewish comedian in New York), the principal of my elementary school in Brooklyn, and a journalist who covered boxing. I think the process was a little bit of both–sometimes the people inspired the melodies, and sometimes he just thought it was nice to dedicate the pieces to them. I think mostly it was the latter.
Sheila: He was a very prolific composer, but he had trouble publishing his music. Why do you think that was the case? Only half of his compositions were published.
Paul: Well, publishing was hard in general. In that same article, my father talks about his struggles. In fact, he published his first piece at his own expense, and he loved seeing his name in print. But it was another 10 years before he was published by a major publisher. There’s a lot of talent and a lot of people writing music. Most people don’t get published. Some who aren’t good get published, and some who are very good don’t get published.
Sheila: Do you attribute any of his publishing difficulties to anti-semitism?
Lex: It’s hard to argue that Jewish composers weren’t getting published. Tin Pan Alley, a lot of Broadway music, Irving Berlin, and Aaron Copland were all published Jewish composers at the time. It was just hard to break in. I don’t think it was prejudice.
Sheila: True, but in Copland’s case, he found success in France, where he sold his first composition and was then discovered by Serge Koussevitsky, who invited him to write a piece for the Boston Symphony which, in some ways, broke him into U.S. publishing.
Paul: I don’t remember my father citing prejudice as a reason for his difficulty in publishing his music. What I do remember very distinctly is that he would get very frustrated–depressed, actually–when his compositions were rejected.
René: After 1954, there was a steady stream of published music except for a few years, notably 1971-1977 and 1979-1981. Do you know what was happening in his life at those times?
Paul: He suffered from clinical depression, and those dates were probably times when it was bad. He was misdiagnosed and incorrectly medicated for years. He tried many forms of medication and therapy. He even tried shock therapy. Later in his life, he finally found medication that really helped. I think music was always his lifeline. The article I talked about earlier–“The Piano Dropout”--has one of the best lines: “In the long run, a piano bench is preferable to the psychiatrist’s couch.”
René: The last piece of music your father published was a piece called “Misty Days,” which was published the year he died, 1987. I’m going to play it for you, and we want you to tell us what this piece means to you.
Paul: Oh, that’s just lovely. And I vaguely remember it. Very melancholy in a nice way. And like so much good music, it’s AABA form, used quite purposefully to build and break expectations in music and to then finish with an “ahhh!.” I truly want to thank you for bringing my father back into my life with our conversations and the recordings of his music. Music was the absolute center of his life.
Rene and Sheila: We just marvel at how the universe brought us together. And we feel so honored to play a role in shining a light on the life and work of Albert Rozin. A light that somehow was eclipsed all these years. Students often want to know about the composers whose music they are learning, and these interviews have opened up opportunities for them to connect to your father and access more of his work – some of it never seen before. It has been an absolute delight to speak with you.
Paul: The pleasure has been equally mine. It has been such a joy to talk about my father and bring his memories to life. And thank you, Rene, for recording a set of his published and unpublished works. I have always wanted that. I can now sit back, close my eyes, listen to his music, and be transported back in time. What a gift. And, perhaps, the greatest gift of all will be that his life will be more widely known and his life’s work, now publicly available, will be enjoyed by many. Wouldn’t that be the perfect ending to this story?