• Katherine Desjardins
  • Lee Hyla

On Saturday morning my Facebook feed began filling with posts expressing shock and grief at the passing of Lee Hyla, a brilliant composer and a professor at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music since 2007. I was a huge fan of his music, and I honored his album My Life on the Plains (Tzadik) in last year’s Best of Chicago issue. But I never met Lee and didn’t know too much about him, aside from the fact that he came to Northwestern from the New England Conservatory of Music. I mentioned his passing—he died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 61—on Monday in a Did You Read? item, but I didn’t feel qualified to write a fitting obituary, and figured the mainstream press would do so (John von Rhein’s obit appears in today’s Tribune, and the NEC put out a lovely piece a few days ago). Still, over the last few days, reading comments and remembrances by many of his current and former students, I was consistently moved by the depth of feeling, admiration, and gratitude people shared for Hyla. The first tribute I saw was by Chicago composer Liza White, and it hit me hard.

Lee loved his students. We could tell. I remember being surprised that he was actually interested in hearing about my job at the coffee shop, he wanted to make sure I was making enough money to get by (usually a taboo subject). He taught me how to listen to Beethoven, and Carter, and Debussy, and Captain Beefheart. He taught me how to slow down and listen again. He taught me how to pour energy into music, holding nothing back.

Nomi Epstein, composer:

He was great in composition lessons at being able to provide helpful feedback without imposing his own ideas or trying to write your piece for you. He had a great sense for form and design, but music never became overly abstract with him—it was always rooted in real sounds and gestures, and this came through in his lessons and in his own compositions. I’ll miss him greatly.

“Goddamned fucking right he was, Lee.”

Lee knew me long before I knew him. He was in graduate school with my parents at SUNY Stony Brook in the late 1970’s—in fact, they were all TAs at the same time and shared an office. At some point, when I must have been no more than a year old, he visited my parents and held me as a baby.