New York Times: Kermit Moore, Cellist, Conductor and Composer, Is Dead at 84

(Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos/New York Times)

Kermit Moore leading an ensemble with James Moody on alto sax in 1999.

New York Times

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: November 11, 2013

Kermit Moore, a cellist, conductor and composer who in all three capacities was concerned with music rooted in the black experience, died on Nov. 2 in Manhattan. He was 84.

The cause was complications after recent surgery, his wife, the composer Dorothy Rudd Moore, said.

As a cellist, Mr. Moore appeared as a soloist and chamber player on some of the world’s leading concert stages. He was renowned for championing the work of 20th-century composers: where another cellist might present a recital in which a single modern work was interleaved among more traditional fare, Mr. Moore typically offered a half-dozen contemporary pieces at once.

Writing in The New York Times in 1969, Peter G. Davis reviewed a program by Mr. Moore at Carnegie Recital Hall that included works by Ben Weber, Iain Hamilton, Roger Sessions, Beatrice Witkin and the African-American composer Hale Smith.

“Mr. Moore vaulted every technical hurdle of his formidable recital with disarming ease,” Mr. Davis wrote. “He is a virtuoso cellist, a sensitive musician and something of a hero.”

Mr. Moore also collaborated with jazz musicians, including the pianist McCoy Tyner and the bassist Ron Carter.

On the podium, he was a regular guest conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and also led the Detroit Symphony, the Berkeley (Calif.) Symphony and Opera Ebony.

Mr. Moore was a founder, the principal cellist, a frequent conductor and an administrator of the Symphony of the New World, an ensemble, begun in New York in 1964, that sought to represent minorities and women in far greater numbers than traditional orchestras did.

He was also the founder and conductor of the Classical Heritage Ensemble, a chamber orchestra specializing in rarely performed classical works.

As a composer, Mr. Moore was known for “Many Thousand Gone,” for strings, flute, percussion and chorus; string quartets; and several pieces for the cello, an instrument that has long been painfully underrepresented in the solo literature.

He composed the soundtrack for “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice,” a documentary about that pioneering black journalist, first broadcast on PBS in 1989.

With the photographer, filmmaker, musician and polymath Gordon Parks, Mr. Moore wrote the soundtrack for the 1984 PBS documentary “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” about a free black man forced into bondage. Mr. Northup’s story is the subject of the current feature film “12 Years a Slave.”

Kermit Diton Moore was born in Akron, Ohio, on March 11, 1929; his middle name was in honor of the African-American composer Carl Diton, whom his parents admired. He began piano lessons with his mother at 5 and at 10 took up the cello.

While still in high school, Mr. Moore studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music; by the time he was 19, he was playing solo recitals in New York.

In Manhattan, Mr. Moore studied the cello with Felix Salmond at the Juilliard School while simultaneously studying composition and musicology at New York University, from which he received a master’s degree. He later studied at the Paris Conservatoire.