Dr. Michael Beckerman is the Carroll and Milton Petrie Chair of Music, Collegiate Professor of Music, and head of the Department of Music at NYU. In short, he’s a big deal. He got his start, however, when he “chose to work on the arcane subject of Janáček’s theoretical works. Though I didn’t know it, I had started the process of ‘buying low and selling high.’” His excellent work on an emerging subject of interest led him from Columbia to Washington University in St. Louis, and then to UC Santa Barbara and NYU.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
The real answer is: I don’t know. Luck mostly. I could say that Christoph Wolff’s decision to leave Columbia for Harvard made my career. But who knows? I came to Columbia to study Mozart and the Bach sons with Prof. Wolff. When he left, and cast to my own devices, I pursued work in the area of Czech music. It helped that I had worked in the old Record Hunter between college and grad school. I met the distributor for Supraphon Records who decided I was energetic and so made a deal with me: he would send me recordings for free each month and if I liked them, I could try to sell them to my customers. This was an amazing education, and I pored over recordings and scores by Stamitz, Fibich, Martinů, Mysliveček, and many, many others.
So, in effect, when I finally chose to work on the arcane subject of Janáček’s theoretical works, though I didn’t know it, I had started the process of “buying low and selling high.” Some of my professors told me that I would be wasting my time studying a composer who no one really knew. But it turned out to be the most wonderful thing. I lived in Czechoslovakia in 1978-79 and had the time of my life, going to concerts, playing music with lots of different people, listening to Czech folklore and studying at the Janáček Archive. And when opera companies started performing his works, people gave me credit for that. Silly people! I had nothing to do with it, but growing interest in the composer certainly helped my career!