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Remembering Al Loeffler: Passionate Musician, Teacher, and Composer

Former Chico State music professor, department chair, symphony conductor, and Chamber Music Workshop director Alfred Loeffler, who died Oct. 26, was a class act, whose depth, breadth of learning, and musical accomplishment were extraordinary.

Born in Brooklyn of a piano-teacher mother and a piano-playing father who once jammed with Paul Whiteman's Collegians, Loeffler moved away from the piano and toward the recorder, then the trombone, then the violin, and, eventually, the viola, which became his primary instrument during his sophomore year at Yale, where he gained a B.A. and two master's degrees in viola and theory, studying under such luminaries as modernist composer/violist Paul Hindemith and noted American violist Joseph Fuchs.

After a three-year stint as a prep-school instructor, Loeffler went on for a Ph.D. in theory and composition (and a minor in art history!) at the University of Minnesota in 1963.

Richly conversant with American and British literature (he even taught prep-school mathematics!), and having developed and taught courses in the humanities, African and non-Western music, early music (a favored specialty), jazz, and nearly every conceivable aspect of music history and theory, Loeffler taught at University of California, Riverside and Eastern Illinois University before coming to Chico State as an instructor in 1974. He and Professor Ray Barker were each given half-time positions and charged with overhauling the music department's core curriculum. Possible competitors, the two men immediately became friends and reorganized the curriculum together. Both went on to serve as department chair a number of times.

An accomplished teacher and composer, Loeffler, a bear of a man with a full red (and, later, white) beard, was an imposing figure. He at once seemed to know everything and, at the same time, had a reticently pensive streak that made approaching him difficult for those who didn't know him. But his apparent aloofness belied the passion and down-to-earth American-ness of his music and his diverse interests, which ranged from Civil War history and American poems, a number of which supplied lyrics for his songs, to the bonsai trees he cultivated at home.

One of Loeffler's greatest passions involved Chico's Summer Chamber Music Workshop, which he directed for years -- until financial straits forced its move to California State University, Sacramento. Perhaps only those who have played or dropped in to listen to amateur chamber music can appreciate the rich delight that comes from playing chamber works (including Loeffler's own compositions) with friends, being coached by professionals, performing for other groups like your own, and then getting together with others to "woodshed" still other pieces late into the evening. This was musical interaction and communication at its most rewarding -- a couple of weeks a year for professionals, engineers, and teachers from throughout California.

Loeffler, whose informal attire -- often flannel shirts and suspenders -- reflected his down-to-earth tastes, delighted in such nonprofessional engagements, much as he delighted in giving students -- rather than professional players -- key roles in the orchestras he conducted.

Loeffler's other passion was composing, and his nearly 50 works, many of them substantial, for nearly every conceivable musical grouping, were rich in humor, melody, and sweetness. I remember especially the autumnal tone colors of a late chorale from his Love's Labors Lost opera (performed in Chico in the mid- 1980s) and watching him and percussionists Dan Kinkle and David Colson sharing jokes and rehearsing his lovely Toccata for Percussion and Synthesizer for a 70th-birthday concert last spring. There was a down-to-earth passion and delight in his music, and many other pieces were still being worked on. Even at 70, Al Loeffler died young.

Ernst Schoen-René