Donald Lybbert was born in Cresco, Iowa in 1923. He was a member
of the American Composers Alliance from 1976 until his death in 1981. He
received a B.Mus. degree from the University of Iowa, the M.A. degree from
Columbia University, and was a Teaching Fellow at The Juilliard School of
Music. He also studied at Fontainebleau, in France, and received an artist’s
diploma. Many of his scores and printing masters were deposited in the
library collections of Hunter College in NYC, where Lybbert served as professor and music department chairman.
excerpted from 1976 BMI promotional brochure, written by Oliver
Daniel:
Lybbert was a disciplined composer, endowed with a strong
feeling for instrumental color. When his opera Monica was given its premiere at
the Netherlands National Opera House in Amsterdam in 1952, Karen Mengelberg
stressed the “intellectual thrust” in his music: “Lybbert’s lines of
thought show his sense for musical logic, and he realized them in an original
way. With genius and talent he made very forceful music from extremely
interesting ideas.”
The Boston premiere of Octagon, a piece for soprano and seven
chamber players which ends with Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses, led David
Noble to write in the Patriot Ledger (April 28, 1975) that “the cumulative
result was undeniable, in the long run marvelous.” His music contains an
underlying force and intensity coupled with a bursting originality.
Lybbert’s first musical training was on the trumpet – as a high
school freshman in Cresco, Iowa. His family encouraged his studies, and
he went on to major in trumpet at the University of Iowa. After World War II
service as a commanding officer of a Navy LST, he went to Juilliard, in his own
words, “hell bent for a trumpet career,” and worked with William Vacchiano.
But while there, also teaching trumpet and brass ensemble in the Extension
Division, he wrote his first piece for wind octet.
From that point, he moved more and more into composing, studying
at Columbia with Elliott Carter and Otto Luening, and later winning a summer
scholarship to works with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau. By the time he
joined the faculty of Hunter College in New York in 1953, where he later became
chairman of the music department, the trumpet had been put away. He taught
theory, composition, and orchestration.
Nicholas Slonimsky wrote of Lybbert, “his style of composition
is evolved from firm classical foundations, but he applies dodecaphonic and
other serial techniques; his rhythmic patterns are asymmetrical but his
polymetry maintains a strong common denominator.” (Baker’s Biographical
Dictionary of Musicians).
Lybbert himself referred to his technique as “post serial” –
free to let go of exact serial specifications when impelled by musical need or
instrumental idiom. His aim, he said, “to write music which is thoroughly
contemporary but still highly idiomatic for the performers.” He admitted
influence of Olivier Messiaen.
