An Almost Forgotten Composer: Odid McPherson. January 13, 2007
Odid McPherson (1936-1989) composed voluminously during a short and relatively uneventful life. He grew up in a tenement on Vermilea Avenue in New York City during the war-ridden 1940s exhibiting but little musical talent in his youth. During his sophomore year at Columbia University, however, he reportedly heard steel drummers while en route to a class in electrical engineering, and his life’s path was thereupon set “as if by a miracle, or something like that.”
McPherson dropped his technological major forthwith and enrolled in a composition class taught by the esteemed professor Vladimir Ussachevsky combining Odid’s old interest in electronics with his new penchant for music. At the then revolutionary Moog Synthesizer, he set about trying to replicate “those wondrous sounds” of the steel drums playing Christmas favorites and “just about had the whole thing down” when it struck him that the instruments he was so expensively emulating could be purchased at but a fraction of what he had already spent. This initiated what we now consider the second crisis of McPherson’s career.
McPherson fortunately had little difficulty selling his hardly used electronic gear to an eager classmate. Using the fortune thus gained, he succeeded in purchasing an entire battery of steel drums, and indeed had plenty left for pursuit of his other major interest, that of consuming generous portions of Chinese food at George Goon’s Canton Restaurant on Mott Street in Chinatown. McPherson often claimed that he found the egg drop soup “quite conducive to composing on the spot.” The chromatic tunings made available by the finest steel drums that money could buy opened all manner of compositional vistas, though he reportedly often regretted being unable to bring them with him to the dinner table on Mott St. to further stimulate his composing.
Tonight’s composition presents our composer’s work at his highest level of maturity. We hope you will enjoy listening to this triple concerto titled "Star-Crossed Buns for Steel Drums, Aluminum Piccolo, Corrugated Iron Contrabassoon, and Plasterboard Orchestra," which is now posthumously receiving its world premiere. How proud would Odid McPherson feel to be present on this historic occasion and hearing his perhaps best work finally being performed tonight by such bright musicians!
Our guest speaker and reviewer Felix Carminum is a Professor Emeritus at Kinetic State College in New Hampshire, as chronicled in Harry Kirschner's study, "The Cult of Kashaknishra," published by Xlibris, 2000 (ISBN#0-7388-4213-3).
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