Richard Cumming
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In an era when many American composers seemed determined to make classical music increasingly difficult to understand, Richard Cumming took a rather different approach: he continued writing music that people might actually enjoy listening to.
This was hardly a sign of limited imagination. Cumming had studied with some of the twentieth century's most formidable musical minds, including Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, and Ernest Bloch. He understood modernism perfectly well. He simply refused to let any particular musical philosophy dictate what he should write.
Instead, he followed his ears, his instincts, and his considerable sense of humor.
The result was a remarkably varied body of music that could be elegant one moment, mischievous the next, and unexpectedly moving just a few measures later. His compositions often reveal an affection for jazz, American popular song, French Impressionism, and the theatrical traditions of Broadway. Yet these influences never sound artificially assembled. They blend into a musical language that is unmistakably his own.
Cumming was also a gifted pianist, an enthusiastic collaborator, a prolific theater composer, and a colorful personality whose friends included some of the most celebrated musicians of his generation.
For pianists discovering his music today, there is a particularly satisfying surprise: behind the charm and apparent simplicity lies a composer of tremendous craftsmanship, imagination, and technical sophistication.
His music may not shout for attention, but it has a wonderful way of making listeners sit up and take notice.
From Shanghai to San Francisco: An Unusual Musical Childhood
Richard Jackson Cumming was born on June 9, 1928, in Shanghai, China—a rather unexpected birthplace for a composer who would eventually develop such a distinctly American musical personality.
His childhood unfolded largely in the Philippines, where he experienced a world far removed from the traditional centers of European classical music. During World War II, his family relocated to the United States, settling in San Francisco.
The move brought Cumming into a thriving musical environment, and he quickly immersed himself in serious piano study and composition.
His teachers formed an extraordinary collection of musical personalities. Among them were Arnold Schoenberg, the revolutionary figure whose twelve-tone system had transformed twentieth-century composition; Roger Sessions, one of America's leading modernists; and Ernest Bloch, whose music combined powerful emotional expression with rich harmonic language.
For piano, Cumming studied with such distinguished artists as Rudolf Firkušný and Lili Kraus.
One might imagine that such training would have produced a composer devoted to uncompromising modernism. Yet Cumming absorbed what interested him without becoming a disciple of any single school.
He was perfectly capable of writing twelve-tone music, but he was equally happy crafting a lyrical melody, a blues-inflected passage, or a sparkling musical joke.
It was a philosophy he would maintain throughout his career: compositional techniques were tools, not commandments.
A Concert Pianist Who Discovered Other Musical Adventures
Before establishing himself as a composer, Cumming enjoyed a substantial career as a concert pianist.
During the early 1950s, he performed extensively in the United States and Europe. His repertoire included the formidable Piano Sonata of Ernest Bloch, which became something of a signature work.
Cumming's own Piano Sonata, composed in 1951, also attracted favorable attention. Following a London performance, the British critic Alec Rowley praised its craftsmanship and considered it among the most attractive recent piano sonatas.
Yet something unexpected happened as Cumming's performing career developed: he realized that the life of a touring solo virtuoso wasn't necessarily the life he wanted.
He loved playing the piano, but he found even greater satisfaction in making music with other people.
Accompanying singers became a particular passion. He collaborated with distinguished vocal artists, including Phyllis Curtin, Donald Gramm, and Jennie Tourel, discovering the extraordinary range of expressive possibilities that emerge when poetry and music meet.
This experience profoundly shaped his composing.
Cumming learned to think of music as speech, conversation, and drama. A melodic phrase could behave like a sentence. A pause could suggest hesitation. A surprising chord could deliver the musical equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
These qualities would become especially important in his piano compositions, many of which seem to contain entire miniature dramas without a single word being spoken.
Twenty-Four Preludes: A World of Characters in Miniature
If one work deserves to bring Richard Cumming back into the wider concert repertoire, it is his extraordinary Twenty-Four Preludes for Piano, composed between 1966 and 1969.
The cycle was commissioned by his close friend, the celebrated American pianist John Browning, who gave its premiere in 1969 and subsequently recorded it.
Browning was no ordinary pianist. He had premiered Samuel Barber's enormously demanding Piano Concerto in 1962 and possessed the kind of virtuosity that could make lesser pianists reconsider their career choices.
According to accounts of the commission, Browning encouraged Cumming to make the Preludes as difficult as possible.
Cumming evidently took the suggestion seriously.
Although the complete collection lasts less than half an hour, its twenty-four miniature compositions contain a remarkable concentration of musical invention. Some are brilliant displays of technical agility. Others are quiet, atmospheric, humorous, or unexpectedly poignant.
The cycle follows the long tradition of composers such as Chopin, Scriabin, and Debussy, who used the prelude as a vehicle for exploring musical ideas in concentrated form.
But Cumming brought something distinctly American to the genre.
His Preludes incorporate angular modernist gestures, lyrical passages, syncopated rhythms, jazz-colored harmonies, and occasional flashes of theatrical exuberance.
What makes the collection especially fascinating is the freedom with which he moves between contrasting musical languages.
Cumming could write strictly organized twelve-tone music without making it sound like an academic exercise. In a 1988 interview, he explained that the D-major Prelude was constructed using strict twelve-tone technique, while the G-minor Prelude employed a tone row treated in a markedly tonal manner.
Such observations reveal an important characteristic of his musical thinking: he was interested in what compositional techniques could express, not merely in demonstrating that he knew how to use them.
For the performer, the Preludes demand considerably more than fast fingers. Their rapidly changing moods require an instinct for characterization, a sensitive touch, and the ability to establish an atmosphere almost instantaneously.
A pianist may have only thirty seconds or a minute to introduce an idea, develop its personality, and bring it to a convincing conclusion.
There is no time for unnecessary gestures.
That economy is part of the collection's genius. Each Prelude feels like a perfectly formed musical thought, sometimes serious, sometimes playful, and occasionally delightfully unpredictable.
The final Prelude brings the cycle to an energetic conclusion, with a sense of propulsion and bravura entirely appropriate to a composer who understood the theatrical value of a strong ending.
Taken together, the twenty-four pieces form one of the more intriguing and unjustly neglected cycles in twentieth-century American piano literature.
Silhouettes: Five Musical Portraits Full of Personality
More than two decades after completing his Preludes, Cumming returned to the idea of compact character pieces with Silhouettes, a collection of five works for solo piano composed in 1993.
Once again, the music was written for John Browning, whose friendship with Cumming had endured for more than forty years.
If the Preludes demonstrate Cumming's remarkable command of musical contrasts, Silhouettes reveals his gift for capturing an entire personality in just a few minutes.
The opening movement, marked Allegro giocoso, ranges across the entire keyboard, from its deepest bass notes to its highest register. It is a wonderfully expansive gesture for a piece that lasts less than two minutes.
The second movement is titled 3 A.M. Blues, and its instruction to play as slowly as possible immediately conjures a different world. Here, the music seems to inhabit those strange, introspective hours when the world has gone quiet but the imagination remains awake.
A lively Vivace follows, providing a welcome change of pace.
The fourth movement, marked Rubato—undulating, bears the subtitle Serenade. Its flexible rhythms and gently shifting gestures create an atmosphere of intimate expression.
The finale returns to a more extroverted musical world, incorporating a Creole melody that Cumming remembered from Ernest Bloch's America Symphony. The result has a distinctly New Orleans flavor, reminding listeners of Cumming's enduring affection for American vernacular music.
There is something especially appealing about these pieces when compared with much of the contemporary piano music of their period.
Cumming was not concerned with making a grand philosophical statement. He was interested in character, atmosphere, memory, and the endlessly entertaining possibilities of the piano.
Each piece enters, establishes its personality, and departs before overstaying its welcome.
Like a collection of clever short stories, Silhouettes leaves the listener wishing there were a few more.
Holidays: A Christmas Present with a Theatrical Secret
One of the most charming stories associated with Cumming's piano music concerns Holidays, a collection of five short pieces for piano four hands, written in 1961.
The suite began as a Christmas present for his sister's five children.
Rather than composing an elaborate concert work, Cumming assembled a collection of delightful miniatures with an appealing mixture of elegance, humor, and affection.
The five movements—Prelude, Sarabande, March, Waltz-Musette, and Lullaby—offer a parade of contrasting musical personalities.
But there was a small secret behind their creation.
As Cumming later cheerfully admitted, he borrowed some of the music from theatrical scores he had already composed, including material associated with productions of Waiting for Godot, Romeo and Juliet, Six Characters in Search of an Author, and William Saroyan's The Cave Dwellers.
There is something wonderfully characteristic about this story. Cumming saw no reason why a good musical idea should be confined to the circumstances of its original creation.
A passage written for the theater might find an entirely new life as a piano miniature.
Perhaps the most entertaining detail comes from his recollection of performing Holidays with John Browning in Positano, Italy, at a benefit concert for a society devoted to stray cats and dogs.
One can scarcely imagine a more delightful setting for a musical collaboration between two accomplished pianists.
Beneath its modest exterior, Holidays demonstrates Cumming's instinct for creating music that is approachable without being ordinary.
The writing is economical, the gestures are beautifully judged, and the collaboration between two pianists adds a particularly engaging conversational quality.
Postcards from Italy: A Musical Vacation with Words
Italy occupied a special place in Cumming's musical imagination, and one of his most delightful creations emerged during a summer visit in 1968.
Cumming was staying near the Italian coast, where John Browning maintained a summer residence in a converted seaside watchtower north of Rome.
Leonard Bernstein reportedly had a villa nearby, and the surrounding landscape was rich with associations with the great composers of the past.
It was an ideal setting for creative inspiration.
Cumming had been working on his chamber opera The Picnic, but an aria stubbornly refused to come together. Frustrated, he temporarily abandoned the opera and turned his attention elsewhere.
Over the course of six days, he composed a suite for solo flute and created Postcards from Italy, a collection of twelve short works combining spoken narration with piano accompaniment.
The individual episodes evoke locations including Venice, Florence, Siena, Rome, Capri, and Positano.
Rather than constructing elaborate musical descriptions, Cumming created a series of brief, impressionistic encounters—little snapshots of places, personalities, and experiences.
The piano becomes an imaginative traveling companion, supplying atmosphere, color, and commentary around the spoken text.
The resulting work is unmistakably theatrical, but its piano writing is a particularly attractive example of Cumming's ability to suggest a complete scene with remarkably few notes.
There is even a happy ending to the story of its creation.
When Cumming returned to his troublesome opera after the six-day diversion, the soprano's aria finally came together.
Sometimes the best way to solve a musical problem is to stop thinking about it.
A particularly appealing recording of Postcards from Italy features actor F. Murray Abraham as narrator, with Cumming himself at the piano.
The Theater: Where Cumming Found His Musical Home
Although his piano music deserves far more recognition than it has received, Cumming's professional life was deeply connected with the theater.
For more than twenty-five years, he served as composer-in-residence and musical director at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island.
The position provided him with a creative environment that suited his personality perfectly.
Here was a place where music was not an isolated intellectual pursuit. It existed alongside dialogue, movement, comedy, tragedy, and the unpredictable energy of live performance.
Cumming wrote music for numerous theatrical productions, working with actors and directors to create scores that supported and enriched the dramatic action.
He also collaborated with director Adrian Hall on an adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which became an important part of Trinity Rep's holiday tradition.
His theatrical career extended beyond Providence to companies throughout the country.
Cumming's chamber opera The Picnic, a work he had begun decades earlier, eventually received its world premiere at Trinity Rep in 1999.
Theater provided him with something that conventional concert life did not always offer: an immediate and practical relationship between music and human experience.
It also helps explain why his piano music can seem so vividly characterized.
In Cumming's hands, even an abstract prelude often feels like a scene from an imaginary play.
A Composer Who Loved the Human Voice
Alongside his work for piano and theater, Cumming was a prolific composer of vocal music, writing more than 150 songs during his lifetime.
His interest in poetry and the expressive capabilities of the human voice was evident throughout his career.
One of his most substantial vocal achievements was We Happy Few, a cycle of ten songs composed in 1963 for bass-baritone Donald Gramm.
Commissioned through the Ford Foundation's Program for Concert Soloists, the work explores the human experience of war through poetry and historical texts spanning many centuries.
The cycle reveals a more serious side of Cumming's artistic personality.
Although he is often remembered for his wit and charm, he was equally capable of confronting difficult subjects with emotional honesty.
The vocal writing reflects the experience of a composer who had spent countless hours accompanying singers and understanding how language, breath, and melodic gesture interact.
His piano accompaniments are never merely decorative.
They participate in the drama, sometimes reinforcing the meaning of the text and sometimes revealing emotional implications that the words leave unspoken.
For Cumming, a well-written melody was not something to apologize for. It was one of music's greatest expressive gifts.
The Man Behind the Music: Brilliant, Funny, and Full of Life
Accounts from those who knew Richard Cumming suggest that his personality was every bit as colorful as his compositions.
His cousin, conductor Edward Cumming, remembered a man of enormous intelligence, seemingly inexhaustible curiosity, and infectious humor.
Books filled his Providence apartment. According to Edward, when asked whether he had read them all, Cumming replied that he had read most of them two or three times.
He was also a marvelous storyteller.
His experiences brought him into contact with remarkable figures, including Igor Stravinsky, Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, and John Browning.
His long friendship with Rorem was particularly significant. Both composers belonged to an American tradition that valued lyricism, clarity, elegance, and the expressive possibilities of the human voice.
Yet Cumming was never simply an imitator of his more famous contemporaries.
He possessed a distinctive blend of intellectual sophistication and irreverent humor that made his music immediately recognizable.
In a revealing 1988 interview with broadcaster Bruce Duffie, Cumming described himself as a tunesmith.
That simple characterization says a great deal about his artistic priorities.
He did not believe that melodic invention and serious composition were mutually exclusive. Nor did he accept that contemporary music had to be difficult or forbidding to possess artistic value.
If a melody wanted to emerge, he saw no reason to suppress it.
His enthusiasm for music extended across centuries and stylistic boundaries, from Bach and Ravel to Gershwin and American popular song.
He was particularly fond of the physical pleasure of playing the piano—the sensation of a beautifully voiced chord fitting naturally beneath the hands.
This affection for the instrument is unmistakable in his own compositions.
Even when his music becomes technically demanding or harmonically complex, there is an underlying sense that it was created by someone who genuinely loved sitting at a piano.
Later Years: A Life Devoted to Music
Cumming remained closely associated with the cultural life of Providence, where his work as a composer, pianist, educator, and theater musician had established him as a beloved artistic figure.
He taught at Providence College and Rhode Island College and received recognition for his contributions to the arts, including Rhode Island's Pell Award and a Governor's Award in 2001.
Although he never achieved the broad public recognition enjoyed by some of his contemporaries, his musical career was neither obscure nor unsuccessful.
His works were performed by distinguished musicians, supported by major arts organizations, and recognized with grants and prizes throughout his lifetime.
His longstanding collaboration with John Browning was especially important in preserving and promoting his piano music.
Browning recorded both the Twenty-Four Preludes and Silhouettes, leaving valuable documents of works that might otherwise have remained unfamiliar to later generations of pianists.
Richard Cumming died on November 25, 2009, in Indianapolis, Indiana, at the age of eighty-one.
His passing marked the loss of an artist who had spent more than half a century demonstrating that originality does not require abandoning melody, and that sophisticated music need not lose its sense of humor.
Rediscovering Richard Cumming: An American Original
There is something especially appealing about discovering a composer such as Richard Cumming.
His music does not fit neatly into the familiar narratives of twentieth-century American classical music.
He was neither a determined experimentalist nor a musical conservative.
He admired Schoenberg but loved Gershwin. He understood serialism but delighted in tonal harmony. He could write demanding concert music while also creating charming miniatures intended as Christmas presents for children.
Perhaps most importantly, he never seemed troubled by these apparent contradictions.
For Cumming, music was simply too rich and varied an art form to be confined to a single philosophy.
His piano works remain particularly rewarding examples of that independence.
The Twenty-Four Preludes offer a fascinating exploration of musical character, virtuosity, and harmonic invention. Silhouettes demonstrates his gift for concentrated expression and playful imagination. Holidays reveals the affectionate humor beneath his sophisticated musical personality, while the early Piano Sonata offers a glimpse of the impressive craftsmanship that characterized his work from the beginning.
Other compositions, including Hommagerie and Alleluia for a Joyous Occasion, further suggest the breadth of his writing for the instrument.
For today's pianists, these pieces offer opportunities to introduce audiences to music that is immediately engaging yet sufficiently sophisticated to reward repeated listening.
And perhaps that is the best way to understand Richard Cumming's lasting importance.
He reminds us that great music does not always arrive accompanied by grand declarations or revolutionary manifestos.
Sometimes it enters quietly, offers a beautiful melody, surprises us with a clever harmonic turn, makes us smile, and then disappears before we have quite finished enjoying it.
Richard Cumming understood the power of that kind of music.
And he spent his life writing it.
Selected Performances
Prelude #8 - One of the quiet gems of Richard Cumming’s 24 Preludes for Piano, Prelude No. 8, written in 1967, is a study in restraint and refinement. Marked Andante, ma con poco moto—“at a walking pace, but with a little motion”—it moves with gentle forward momentum, like a solitary figure on a shaded path, never in a hurry, yet never static.
The music unfolds in a single page, but within its modest frame lies a complete mood. Harmonies are voiced with care—neither lush nor sparse, but delicately balanced. The left hand often provides quiet motion, while the right hand sings understated, almost conversational lines. There’s an emotional ambiguity to the piece: neither clearly joyful nor mournful, it occupies a middle space—thoughtful, perhaps lightly introspective.
Silhouettes: I. Allegro Giocoso - The first movement of Silhouettes by American composer Richard Cumming (1928–2009) introduces the set with a concise character piece that reflects Cumming’s gift for nuance, clarity, and theatrical atmosphere. Likely composed during the 1950s or early 1960s, this movement was part of a suite of short piano works, each titled to evoke a fleeting impression or mood—true to the name Silhouettes. Though not widely published, the suite circulated among pianists familiar with Cumming’s work in theater and chamber music circles.
Prelude #24 - Richard Cumming wraps up his set of 24 piano preludes with a lightning bolt of energy. Clocking in at under a minute, this final piece may be short, but it’s anything but quiet. Packed with rhythmic punch and a flair for drama, Prelude No. 24 charges ahead with the confidence of a performer taking one last bow—bold, stylish, and unapologetically virtuosic.
Locating The Music
Cumming's 24 preludes can be purchased from Sheet Music Plus. His other piano works, the piano sonata, Silhouettes and Holidays, unfortunately all seem to be out of print.
Compositions for Piano
Piano Sonata - 1951
Holidays (1953)
Twenty-Four Preludes - 1969
Silhouettes (5 solo-piano pieces) - 1953-1993
