Getty, Gordon

Getty, Gordon, American composer; b. Los Angeles, Dec. 20, 1933. He was the scion of the billionaire oil executive and art collector Jean Paul Getty. In 1945 he was taken to San Francisco, where he studied English literature at San Francisco State Coll. (graduated, 1956) and took courses at the San Francisco Cons, of Music. From his earliest attempts at composition, he pro-claimed faith in the primacy of consonance and a revival of Romantic ideals. His preference lay with vocal music, and he possessed a natural gift for writing a fetching melodic line. For his songs and choruses, he selected the poems of Housman, Tennyson, Poe, and Dickinson. He also produced an opera, Plump Jack, based on the character of Shakespeare’s Falstaff (excerpts only; San Francisco, March 13, 1985). The inevitable headline in one of several newspaper reviews was “Billionaire Has a Hit in Plump Jack!” Every critic’s writing about Getty must deal with the inescapable suspicion that his music is the accidental outgrowth of his material fortune, and must conquer conscious or subliminal prejudice in favor or disfavor of a work. Getty deserves full credit for braving this test courageously, ignoring bouquets and brickbats and persevering in writing his kind of music. Among his other works are the piano pieces Homework Suite, 3 Diatonic Waltzes, and Tiefer und Tiefer (all 1986), and a vocal work, The White Election for Soprano and Piano, to poems by Emily Dickinson (1986).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire