Scope and Content Note
The Steven Stucky Papers span 1934 to 2015, with the bulk dating from 1983 to 2010. The collection documents Stucky’s career as a composer, scholar, conductor, and university faculty member.
The Music series consists of holograph and printed music in two subseries, Music by Stucky and Music by Other Composers. The Music by Stucky subseries includes sketches and drafts of his orchestral and chamber works, most of which are accompanied by published versions containing his annotations. Music by Other Composers consists primarily of printed works that Stucky conducted, programmed, or considered for performance by Ensemble X, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, or the Green Umbrella new music series. Witold Lutosławski's music is also well represented in this subseries.
The Subject Files are the largest non-music series in the collection. These include Stucky’s research materials on other composers that he used for pre-concert lectures and programming, namely biographies, publicity, reviews, and musical excerpts. It also contains documentation about Stucky’s own compositions. Of interest are his analyses of his works that he used as teaching examples in courses at Cornell and lectures outside the university. Other materials in this series represent some of the major awards that Stucky received for his compositions, including documents from his 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Second Concerto for Orchestra and his entrance pass for the 2013 Grammy Awards, when August 4, 1964 was nominated for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. His annotated scripts for the New York Philharmonic’s Hear & Now pre-concert lectures are also in this series. The correspondence consists primarily of short letters from many other composers who were Stucky’s contemporaries. His publications are represented in this series, along with a small number of personal papers and photographs.
The Witold Lutosławski Materials series details Stucky’s role as a leading scholar of Lutosławski’s music. This series contains Stucky’s research, publications, program notes, and dissertation on Lutosławski’s works. There are also reviews of his book, Lutosławski and His Music (1981), correspondence from Lutosławski, Stucky’s writings on Lutosławski, and conference papers. Some materials in this series are in Polish.
Stucky was the composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1988 to 2009. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Materials contain his scripts from the Upbeat Live pre-concert lectures that he hosted. As composer-in-residence, he served as the consulting composer for new music and directed the orchestra’s Green Umbrella new music series. Programs and planning documents for Green Umbrella are in this series. Information and schedules from Los Angeles Philharmonic seasons between 1992 and 2009 can also be found here, along with Stucky’s clippings about the construction and opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Teaching Materials comprise materials that Stucky generated as a professor of music at Cornell University. They include several graduate student candidacy exams he authored and notes for courses he taught on music theory and music history. This series also contains his annotated lecture scripts and corresponding musical examples for talks he gave outside Cornell University. Topics of these lectures include music history, the current state of classical music, and his compositions and compositional process.
The Clippings are newspaper and magazine articles that date from the 1960s to 2013. Those from the 1960s are features on Stucky as a young composer. Most materials in this series are reviews of performances of Stucky’s music, interviews, and feature articles written when he received awards. Performances of Stucky’s works from 1970 through 2015 are also documented in the Programs series. It includes programs from the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella chamber music series and Ensemble X, a contemporary chamber ensemble that Stucky founded and conducted that consisted of Ithaca College and Cornell University faculty. Some of these materials contain program notes that Stucky authored.