Excellence In Teaching

     As a teacher, musician, and composer, music professor Max Lifchitz is a virtuoso.
     Lifchitz feels that music is more “a vocation than a choice.” He believes that music - and all of the arts - “add a certain spiritual or aesthetic dimension to life. You can't live without the arts.”
     The Mexico City native joined the University's Department of Music in 1986 via New York City, where he went to live in the 1960s in order to study at Juilliard. Albany attracted him because “I liked the campus and the friendly environment. It was the right place for me to continue some of the things I had been doing in terms of Latin American music. I started the first graduate course in the music department in conjunction with the Graduate Liberal Studies program. The course is called The Humanities through Music, and I am teaching it again this fall. A few years ago, I started a course called Latin American Music in Society, a writing-intensive diversity course that meets several requirements. I've also taught more traditional courses - music theory, composition, orchestration - from introductory to advanced.” 
      Lifchitz was also instrumental - no pun intended - in obtaining funding from SONY Corp. to purchase computers and digital tape recorder machines for the electronic music and music notation lab. “The equipment allows students to input the music, and the computer plays it back,” explains Lifchitz. “The computer is really changing the way music is written; it's good for the student and for the teacher.” He also played a key role in getting two recording courses in the music curriculum. Of teaching, Lifchitz notes: “I enjoy the exchange with the students. They're very bright - very observant and articulate. That's really one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching: I don't have to impose knowledge on my students; it's a two-way street, where I converse with them. They give me a fresh perspective on things. I've also learned a lot from my colleagues.”
     In addition to teaching, Lifchitz has served as music department chair (1995-98) and on numerous University committees. He recently completed a term as chair of the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In the Capital Region community, Lifchitz is known for his concerts, which are presented through the University's music department, and for his talks through the Institute for Lifelong Learning in Delmar. His lectures and performances, like similar outreach activities sponsored by the Art Museum and the New York State Writers Institute, provide “avenues for the University to have a dialogue with the community,” Lifchitz says.
      On the personal side, the Juilliard and Harvard graduate keeps up a daunting schedule. He performs with the North/South Consonance Ensemble, a group of North American and Latin American musicians he brought together in 1980, and records with the ensemble's label, North/South Recordings, as well as with RCA Victor, Phillips, and other companies. His performances - sponsored by such organizations as the Aaron Copland Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation - have been reviewed in a number of publications, including The Washington Post and Fanfare. The New York Times lauded his “clean, measured and sensitive performances”; The San Francisco Chronicle called Lifchitz “a young composer of brilliant imagination and a stunning, ultra-sensitive pianist.” 
     Lifchitz also receives high praise from Department of Music Chair Reed Hoyt, who describes him as “a nationally and internationally known composer, pianist, and conductor. We have been privileged to hear performances by North/South Consonance - events that showcase his abilities in all three areas - on campus several times. Max's career as a whole has been a story of diverse interests and talents; he has contributed to our curriculum in multifarious ways. He has presided over the program in composition not just by working with our students, but also by exposing them to cutting-edge technology. He has taught General Education courses, as well as courses in music theory for majors and non-majors. His scholarly and personal interest in the music of his native Latin America has led to the development of a highly successful course in Latin American music; he also teaches in the program for Presidential Scholars and in Project Renaissance. That array of courses is remarkably comprehensive in its range.”
     His musical mastery has brought Lifchitz numerous other accolades, including the United Nations Peace Medal in 1982; first prize in the 1976 Gaudeamus Competition for Performers of Contemporary Music, held in Holland; and the 1994 Distinguished Service Award from New York Women Composers. Lifchitz has also been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and composer-in-residence at Wolf Trap Farm National Park and at KPFK-FM in Los Angeles. 
    The versatile Lifchitz has composed numerous works for orchestra, band, chamber ensemble, solo instruments, and vocalists. His compositions include Intervención (for violin and orchestra); Mosaico Mexicano; Canto de Paz; and Of Bondage and Freedom, which was commissioned by Capital Region residents Beno and Lisa Sternlicht in memory of Mr. Sternlicht's mother, Helene Anisfeld Sternlicht, who perished in Warsaw during the Holocaust. Lifchitz also composed the fanfare for President Hitchcock's inauguration. His most recent project, reworking a three-act opera written more than 40 years ago by the late Carlos Chávez, commemorates what would have been the Mexican composer's 100th birthday this year. Lifchitz made the revisions to the piece - which is based on Boccaccio's Decameron - using notes Chávez made before his death in 1978. The opera went into rehearsal this summer and will be performed in Mexico in November.
 

Strangers in The Land of Paradise by Lillian S. Williams
By Carol Olechowski 

     Strangers in the Land of Paradise (1999, Indiana University Press, $49.95) by Lillian S. Williams of the Department of Women’s Studies chronicles the establishment, during the first 40 years of the 20th century, of a community founded by strong men and women and held together by faith, family, pride, and hard work.
     The settlers who founded the community she writes about “were agents in its creation rather than passive, despite the discrimination they experienced,” Williams said.
    The book presents a fascinating portrait of the reasons why African Americans migrated to the western New York city in great numbers. It describes the neighborhoods where they settled, the jobs they undertook, and the social, civic, and religious organizations they founded. Supplemented by  photographs that capture community members at work and at play, Strangers in the Land of Paradise also features maps that document where blacks and other immigrants settled in the city, and highlights landmarks like the Michigan Avenue Baptist Church. 
     Williams, a native of Niagara Falls, chose Buffalo as the venue for her research for several reasons. As an under- graduate research assistant at the University at Buffalo, she worked with prominent historian Herbert Gutman, who encouraged her “to examine the African American community.” The city, the second-largest transportation hub in the United States - after Chicago - in the late 1800s and early 1900s, afforded African Americans job opportunities with railroads, hotels, and other travel-related industries that were not available elsewhere. The economy was healthy, and many of the city's residents were well-to-do.
     “Buffalo was one of the 20 largest cities in the U.S. The buildings constructed at the turn of the century were beautiful; and the park system, laid out by landscape architect Frank Law Olmsted, was magnificent. It still is. And Buffalo pioneered so many things, including electric street lights and paved roads. People thought of this spectacularly beautiful city as paradise,” Williams explains.
      While Strangers in the Land of Paradise was written primarily “for those interested in urban history, sociology, anthropology, public policy, or education,” its style and content will appeal to a general audience, as well. Through excerpts from personal letters and documentation drawn from such resources as the Erie County Historical Society, Williams brings to life the men and women of the vibrant African American community in Buffalo. One example is a description of the life of Will Talbert, an “enterprising young man” who, as the son of prominent businessman Robert Talbert, “was more privileged than most children in Buffalo, black or white.” By recounting young Talbert's seven-block walk to school, his curriculum (which included courses in physics, history, grammar, civil government, and music), his “active social life,” and even his after-school detention for being “mischievous” (by whispering in class), Williams breathes life into her subject. Further on, the author offers information about the living arrangements, marital status, and jobs of various community residents. This documentation, along with excerpts from letters written by blacks in the North to their families and friends down South, paints a vivid picture of the socioeconomic realities faced by working-class African Americans. 
      Although, like European immigrants, blacks in Buffalo experienced “discrimination in housing, jobs, and education, it was quite clear that ethnicity seemed to be less threatening than race. If you look at employment, especially at factories, workers of Anglo background tended to be in managerial positions. Poles, who were generally laborers, sometimes moved into supervisory positions. There was a distinct attempt to place individuals, based on their ethnicity, into positions.”
     In response to these inequities, Buffalo's African Americans “organized groups to address those disparities,” Williams points out. “They were exploited economically, and they experienced political oppression and social ostracism, but they were intent upon bettering their social condition.” Those organizations - such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs - continue today to carry out the missions for which they were established generations ago.
     Williams - a faculty member at Albany since 1987 - is currently at work on another book. Tentatively titled Blacks in Green, it tells the story of African American involvement in Girl Scouting. 
      The author is very busy promoting her most recent book; she has done several radio interviews, including one with National Public Radio affiliate WBFO at the University at Buffalo. She also visited Buffalo last week for a book signing.
      Williams hopes that “contemporary policymakers” will read Strangers in the Land of Paradise, as well. In detailing “the ways gender, race, and class; a strong work ethic; and commitment to education enabled African Americans to create a viable community,” she says, the book should be valuable as a resource for “addressing contemporary social ills.”