Harold Meltzer, a composer who set aside a career as a lawyer to create a highly regarded body of energetic, colorful chamber, vocal and orchestral scores that mixed accessibly melodic themes and rich ensemble textures with the sharp-edged angularity of modernism, died on Aug. 12 in Manhattan. He was 58.
Hilary Meltzer, his wife, said that his death, in a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, a complication of a variety of medical problems he had withstood since having a stroke in 2019.
Mr. Meltzer, who was also a director (first with David Amato, later with Sara Laimon) of Sequitur, a new-music ensemble, cut an imposing figure at contemporary music concerts in the 1990s and 2000s.
Bespectacled, with wavy hair, he invariably entertained friends during intermissions with wry observations about the music world in general, or the events of the day. Even after his stroke, when he began using a wheelchair, he was determined to maintain something approximating his earlier level of activity, and after only two months of therapy, he appeared as the narrator for his theater work “Sindbad,” a humorous 2005 setting of a Donald Barthelme story that was one of his most frequently performed works.
His music was impossible to pigeonhole, mainly because each work was his response to a different set of challenges. In “Virginal” (2002), for harpsichord and 15 other instruments, he wanted to pay tribute to William Byrd, John Bull and other Elizabethan composers whose works were included in the “Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,” a collection of English Renaissance keyboard pieces. To avoid creating a pastiche, he did not quote from any of their music, focusing instead on the structures and processes (repeating figuration., for example) that made their music distinct.
When the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra gave the premiere of Mr. Meltzer’s “Vision Machine” at Carnegie Hall in 2016, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote in The New York Times that the work “deftly captures the interaction of the architecture and its environment, with puffy woodwind chords evoking cloud-chased skies, and delicate arpeggios, traded back and forth between the violins and the harp, mimicking light bouncing off a faceted surface.”
If there was one element that connected many of Mr. Meltzer’s works, it was an imaginative use of tone color. “Brion” (2007-8), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is a lively conversation between pairs of blown, plucked and bowed instruments. “Guangzhou Circle” (2015-16) juxtaposes traditional Chinese instruments (dizi, erhu, pipa and sheng) and a Western percussion quartet. His final completed work, a setting of Aracelis Girmay’s poem “You Are Who I Love” (2024), was composed for the Crossing, a Philadelphia-based choir, and Sandbox Percussion, and is rich in interplay between the two ensembles.
He was also fond of the kind of musical pictorialism that drives “Vision Machine.” His 2016 Piano Quartet captures a succession of emotional states, notated in his score markings, among them “ardent,” “contented,” “effervescent” and “ecstatic.” His chamber setting of Wallace Stevens’s “Variations on a Summer Day” (2016) evokes the shifting moods of the text, but also illustrates it — for example, by mimicking the calls of sea gulls when the poem mentions them.
Harold Meltzer was born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1966, to Stanley Meltzer, a lawyer, and Teddi (Trachter) Meltzer, an English teacher, and grew up in Hicksville, on Long Island.
As a teenager, he studied the piano and the bassoon, and took composition and music theory lessons from Morton Estrin. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, he studied composition with Lewis Spratlan, bassoon with Frank Morelli and piano with Robert Miller. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Amherst, graduating summa cum laude in 1988, and then traveled to England, where he earned a master of philosophy degree in music at King’s College Cambridge in 1991.
But Mr. Meltzer, realizing the difficulty of making a career as a composer, enrolled at Columbia Law School, where he completed his degree in 1992, while also studying composition privately with Tobias Picker. Upon graduation, he joined the law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. But after two years, he reconsidered his decision to abandon music, and enrolled at the Yale School of Music. He completed his master’s in 1997 and his doctorate in 2000 at Yale, where he studied composition with Martin Bresnick, Jacob Druckman and Anthony Davis while also working part time at his father’s law firm, Meltzer, Fishman, Madigan & Campbell. He later studied privately with the composer Charles Wuorinen and the pianist Ursula Oppens.
Shortly after he returned to his musical studies, a friend from Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler who had moved to the environmental law division of the New York City Law Department arranged a blind date for Mr. Meltzer with Hilary Brest, another lawyer who worked there, who was also an avid cellist. They married in 1996 and had two children: Julia Meltzer, who works for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Elijah Meltzer, a student at Stanford University. His wife and children survive him, as does his mother and his sister, Rachel Meltzer. He lived in Manhattan.
“I continued trekking off to new-music concerts,” Mr. Meltzer told The Times about his time balancing music and the law. “But I couldn’t get anyone to go with me. When I did drag people along, they couldn’t stand it. These were people who were into avant-garde theater and contemporary art, but when I played them new music, they were lost. So I began to think about forming an ensemble and decided that if I did, I would identify the audience that didn’t come to concerts and get them to come.”
The ensemble he formed was Sequitur, a free-spirited group that explored competing and sometimes clashing streams of contemporary music, often with a focus on vocal works, because Mr. Meltzer believed that sung texts would appeal to listeners who might otherwise avoid new music. The group made its debut at Merkin Concert Hall in February 1997. He remained the group’s co-director until 2012.
Although Sequitur performed some of Mr. Meltzer’s music, most of his compositions were commissioned by other ensembles and institutions, including the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Boston Chamber Music Society, Meet the Composer, Maverick Concerts, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Brooklyn Art Song Society and the Library of Congress.
Mr. Meltzer also taught music at Yale, Vassar College, Amherst and the Peabody Institute. Among his awards were a Charles Ives Fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters; the Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellowship; the Barlow Prize from Brigham Young University; and the Leonard Bernstein Prize from ASCAP.
Read More: Harold Meltzer, Composer of Impossible-to-Pigeonhole Works, Dies at 58
