Gerald Carpenter: A Requiem For Emma Lou and Betty | Arts & Entertainment

Most of those reading this are already aware that June witnessed the winking out of two of the brightest lights of our local music world: the composer/organist/educator Emma Lou Diemer (1927-2024) died June 2, while her colleague and friend, pianist/educator Betty Oberacker (1932-2024), passed away June 28.

Both of these transcendent artists led long and amazingly productive lives, and they leave behind a rich, permanent record of achievement in the form of scores, essays and recordings, not to mention the living testimony of their many, many illustrious students.

So there is, in their departures, no hint of the tragedy of creative lives cut off at the flood, with so much yet to do; there is only the great personal sorrow of those of us who will miss them, who will experience their physical absence as gaping holes in the fabric of daily life.

Probably the greatest benefit of my profession is the opportunity to meet and talk with artists I would otherwise have to be content with admiring from afar.

In most cases, to be sure, when one is seized by great art in any genre, meeting the artist tends to diminish, rather than enhance, one’s feeling for the art.

This was blessedly not the case with Emma Lou or Betty. Their personalities were as luminous as their music, as is often true of artists who are also beloved teachers.

Emma Lou Diemer composed within the context of an academic career, yet there was nothing “academic” about her music, which manages to sound both spontaneous and carefully — indeed, brilliantly — crafted. It rather nagged at her, however, to be generally classified, and implicitly dismissed, as a “woman composer.”

“I’m a composer — period,” she told me once.

Not bound to any particular “school,” she was gloriously eclectic with respect to style, and usually let the music dictate its own historical framework.

Betty Oberacker played the piano music of every era — baroque, classical, romantic, modern, contemporary — as if that period were her specialty.

Her Mozart was silvery and precise and flowing; her Schoenberg was cerebral and Teutonic; her Beethoven, heroic and exalted; her Bartók, aggressively dissonant, with an Hungarian chip on its shoulder.

She had, that is to say, an uncanny facility for becoming whatever composer she was performing.

Emma Lou joined the UCSB Music Department faculty in 1971; Betty, in 1973. The two had, thus, some 50 years to absorb each other’s aesthetic worlds.

The most spectacular result of their friendship was Emma Lou’s “Piano Concerto in One Movement” (1992), written for Betty, dedicated to her, premiered and recorded by her.

Emma Lou Diemer “Piano Concerto in One Movement” – www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdpyCwALApI&t=117s
 
[Another fine local composer, John Biggs, also composed a terrific piece for Betty, his “Variations on a Theme of Shostakovich” (1978), which she premiered and recorded:
 
John Biggs’ “Variations on a Theme of Shostakovich”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NbiafgQivI]
 
It was my privilege to know both Emma Lou and Betty — although my relationship to them was never more intimate than that of a journalist to his subject — and I feel the world to be significantly colder for their absence.

They are safe at home, now, and we are left to find our way forward without them.

Requiescat in Pace.