Lukas Foss

Lukas Foss stood out as a composer, conductor, and teacher whose wide-ranging efforts deepened public engagement with concert music across the twentieth century. His scores drew upon prevailing idioms of the era while he persistently pursued fresh avenues of expression. In prominent podium roles across America and abroad, he exposed listeners to an array of modern idioms. As a teacher he wielded considerable influence, and his music kept drawing fresh listeners well into the following century; a set of his pieces led by JoAnn Falletta, whom he had guided as a mentor, appeared on a Buffalo Philharmonic recording in 2024.

Born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin on August 15, 1922, Foss was the son of philosopher Martin Fuchs, who later adopted the surname Foss. He began lessons in his native city under Julius Goldstein, yet in 1933 his Jewish family escaped Nazi Germany. While living in Paris he worked on piano with Lazare Levy, composition with Noel Gallon, orchestration with Felix Wolfes, and flute with Marcel Moyse. The family reached the United States in 1937 and took the name Foss. At Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, where Leonard Bernstein was a fellow student, the two formed a friendship that lasted throughout their lives. Foss went on to study composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale and conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Music Center between 1939 and 1943. By then his creative output was already advancing; the cantata Prairie earned him a New York Music Critics Award in 1942.

That score and other early pieces echoed the populist-neoclassic manner of Aaron Copland, though Foss increasingly ventured into unexplored territory. Among his notable early works stood Symphony No. 1, completed in 1944, and the 1949 opera The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, drawn from a Mark Twain tale. He served as pianist of the Boston Symphony from 1944 to 1950, composing during breaks from that post. In 1945 he became the youngest composer awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he held a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome during 1950 and 1951. Succeeding Arnold Schoenberg in 1953, Foss joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles, where he instructed students in both composition and conducting; many of those pupils later achieved distinction.

He continued to accept conducting engagements, serving as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra from 1963 to 1970 and establishing the Center for Creative and Performing Arts there. From 1971 to 1990 he led the Brooklyn Philharmonic and afterward held the title of conductor laureate with that ensemble. He also directed the Kol Israel Orchestra in Jerusalem and the Milwaukee Symphony between 1981 and 1986. Certain scores adopted atonality or incorporated serial techniques and chance operations, while many later pieces embraced eclectic or polystylistic approaches. Beginning in 1991 he taught composition and theory at Boston University and maintained an active schedule of guest appearances with orchestras in America and Europe. Among his later scores were the Renaissance Concerto for flute and orchestra, finished in 1985, and the Concerto for band of 2002. In his final years Foss contended with Parkinson’s disease yet sustained his activities until his death in New York on February 1, 2009.