Emma Lou Diemer — extraordinary person, musician, and composer — left her beloved world this past June 2 at the ripe age of 96. She would readily admit to having been very fortunate, living a healthy and long life, loving her family, her dearest Marilyn, and her adopted town of Santa Barbara very much. She was a happy but self-contained person, whose joy and expression were almost entirely through music. “Sometimes in writing, I am so pleased with the music that is developing that I get up and run around the house … or, on occasion, I weep with the music I’m writing, or the words. And I am a person of great reserve. I guess that is why I write music?”
Emma Lou Diemer left the world hundreds of published musical works for organ, piano, voice, choir, band, orchestra, and various chamber ensembles. She wrote virtuosic music and music for young musicians to play, sacred and secular, music that would be admired by academics and regular music lovers alike.
In an interview once, she said she’d rather compose than eat hot fudge sundaes. She loved creating something that had never been done before, that people would perform and enjoy. Spreading the joy. She was so prolific because writing made her happy. Possibly coincidentally, Gebrauchsmusik is a term associated with Paul Hindemith, who was one of her composition teachers. It means functional or utility music — composed for an identifiable purpose such as for students or a particular ceremony. For more than eight decades (her first church job was at the age of 13), Emma Lou played and wrote music most days of her life.
For those who knew Emma Lou, her most remarkable quality was the contrast between herself and her music. Other than her occasional spikey humor or intelligent musings, she was understated in most every way – her petite physical self, her smile, her style of dress, her gait, the soft tone of her voice, her presence among people. This subdued nature of hers disappeared when she sat at an organ or piano because it was not herself there, only her music. Which was BIG. She blew listeners away with the intensity, the verve, the dynamism of her music as she played, even in church. How perfectly appropriate for her that the organist usually sits invisibly behind the massive console, having the power of great volume, innumerable timbres (colors), pedals, and multiple keyboards. Orchestration at hand! (Or hands and feet.) Church congregations were fortunate to have this experience weekly, but musicians and audiences around the world have heard her ceaseless variety and optimism that happily lives on.
As an organist, she would not only play what was on the page. Her mind and fingers were so facile, she likely had to restrain herself when necessary to accompany others. As a professor of composition, what a great skill it was to have, for the students’ inspiration!
This is how Emma Lou ended up in Santa Barbara in the early ’70s. She had been teaching and playing in churches on the East Coast and, not knowing anything about Santa Barbara except that it was on the West Coast, applied for a position in the Music Department at UCSB. Peter Racine Fricker, the department chairman and a very distinguished composer and organist himself, hired her on the phone. Apparently, his secretary had sung one of her pieces in high school, but clearly, he was impressed by her work and not bothered that she was a woman. This was quite amazing for that time, as was the fact that she soon after started the electronic music studio there with the purchase of a large modular Moog synthesizer and tape recorder, when there were very few in the nation.
She drove across country in 1971 with two small dogs, a cat, some goldfish, and a parakeet, whose talking provided good company. One cold night, the goldfish succumbed, but the rest happily made it. It must have been right for her to come. Her office number was 1111, and she has related that every one of her family’s birthdays contained the number 11. She was very close to her family, especially her older sister Dorothy, some of whose poems she set to music.
I was one of the many fortunate students who were able to experience her genius at my composition lessons. Writing came slowly to me, and I’d be stuck. She would sit at her piano to play what I had written and then continue with ideas that would simply flow from her fingers. I owe my career to her, its roots being in that very electronic music studio she created.
Others felt her genius and support in other ways. Ilana Eden described playing with her in church: “Performing with Emma Lou Diemer was like floating on a cloud of safety. She would take pieces generally written for flute with piano accompaniment and instantly orchestrate them to use the astonishing sounds of her church organ.” An organist colleague of hers and music director at Trinity Episcopal, Tom Joyce heard her music when he was a student at Oberlin Conservatory and then many years later in Santa Barbara. He had a deep well of respect for her, was honored that she would attend his recitals, as her support was like “wind in his sails.”
Emma Lou’s autobiography is called My Life as a Woman Composer. Written during the COVID years, it gives rare insights into a very private person who rarely spoke about herself and whose memory was spectacular considering she was in her nineties. Through myriad stories about her family life and people she knew, about her work and travels, she gave us a picture. The title may have been a bit of satire. How nice it would have been to be simply called a composer.
The Santa Barbara Symphony, where Emma Lou was composer in residence some years ago, has programmed one of Emma Lou’s works – “Homage to Tchaikovsky” — for its opening concert on October 19 and 20 at The Granada Theatre. On that Sunday during the matinee performance will also be a celebration of her life at the First Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall from 2 to 4 p.m. So please consider attending the Saturday night performance to hear both Tchaikovsky and Emma Lou’s homage to him and then join us on Sunday.
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