James E. Sellars

1940 - 2017

James E. Sellars obituary, 1940-2017, Hartford, CT

James Sellars Obituary



James Edward Sellars, the imaginative and original composer, outspoken commentator on music and art, and demanding but inspiring teacher of hundreds of students at the Hartt School, University of Hartford, died at his Hartford home on February 26, 2017. He was 76. In the last years of his life, he suffered from a degenerative nerve disease, which left him increasingly immobile and unable to read or listen to music, though he retained his incisive and sometimes cutting wit to the end. Sellars was born at the Sparks Memorial Hospital in Fort Smith Arkansas on October 8, 1940 to Wayne Edward Sellars and Omah Dodson Sellars. Known as "Buddy" to his friends and family until he was in his thirties, he was drawn to music at an early age. He remembered Beethoven's Fur Elise as an early favorite. When his father took him as a boy to a record store to buy his first record of classical music, he asked the clerk for something sad - the clerk recommended the Pathetique Symphony by Tchaikovsky, who remained a favorite composer of his for the rest of his life. In Fort Smith he studied piano with Ester Graham who recognized his musical talent and recommended that he study music composition. After high school, he moved to New York City. He first attended Julliard but quickly switched to the Manhattan School of Music where he studied with Ludmila Ulehla and David Diamond. During the 1960's he lived with his life partner Gary Knoble in Brooklyn Heights where, in addition to his musical studies, he was music critic for the Brooklyn Heights Press, choral director of the First Unitarian Congregation Society, and owner of a photographic studio on Montague Street. He took a Masters Degree in Music at Southern Methodist University and a PhD in Composition and Theory at the University of North Texas. In 1975 Sellars, Knoble, and their new partner Robert Black moved to Hartford, Connecticut. Sellars was music critic for the Hartford Courant in the late 1970's and early 1980's. In 1976, his First Piano Sonata won first prize at the Stroud Festival in Gloucestershire, England, where it was premiered by the British pianist Howard Shelley. Sellars began teaching composition and theory at the Hartt School in 1978 where he founded the Hartt Contemporary Players and eventually became the chair of the Composition Department. When Virgil Thomson won a Kennedy Center Award in 1983 he asked Sellars to conduct his Sonata da Chiesa at the awards ceremony. Openly gay from an early age, Sellars was an empathetic mentor to many of his gay students. His music was frequently presented in the early years of the experimental art space Real Art Ways, first located in Joseph Celli's loft in downtown Hartford. In 1984, at the closing outdoor gala concert of the New Music America festival on the grounds of the Old State House, the Hartford Symphony featured his Concertorama, a concerto for piano and orchestra with pianist Yvar Mikhashoff as soloist. Sellars' home was an artistic salon for his students, colleagues and friends with guests that included the musicians John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Ross Lee Finney, Brian Ferneyhough, Charles Wuorinen, Morton Feldman, Michael Barrett, Eleazar de Caravalho, and Leonard Bernstein. The pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, the conductors James Bolle and Michael Barrett, the writer Charlie Scheips, and the poets Jonathan Williams and Thomas Meyer, all indefatigable proponents of Sellars' music, were also frequent quests. His music was eclectic and original, labeled by some as post modern. His opera The World is Round, 1993 (based on a text by Gertrude Stein) received several performances at the Avery Theater in Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum. His other major pieces include Return of the Comet, 1986 (first performed by the London ensemble Spectrum); Afterwards, 1995 (a "re-composition" of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony first performed by the New Hampshire Symphony); For Love of the Double Bass, 1983 (first performed by Sellars and Black at Real Art Ways); Beulah in Chicago, 1981(first performed at the Monadnock Music Festival in New Hampshire); Chanson Dada, 1979 (first conducted by Bolle at the Monadnock Music Festival and later by Lucas Foss at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and by Eleazar de Carvalho at the Memorial de America Latina in Sao Paulo, Brazil); August Week, 1982 (first performed at Sellars' 75th birthday celebration in 2015 at Hartt); Don't Stop, 1996 (first performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at Lincoln Center in New York City); Go, 1997 (first performed by the California EAR Unit); String Quintet, 1996 (first performed at the Monadnock Music Festival); Six Piano Sonatas, 1973-1986; and Haplomatics 1983-2014 (with images by the painter David Hockney). Thanks to Finn Byhard and a former student Thomas Schuttenhelm, his musical legacy is being well preserved. Sellars retired from the Hartt School in 2002. He is survived by his life partners Gary Knoble and Robert Black, as well as legions of devoted colleagues, students, and friends. At Sellars' request, no memorial service will be held but a concert in his honor is being planned for the fall.

Published by Hartford Courant from Mar. 22 to Mar. 26, 2017.
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So sad to hear of the passing of James Sellars, my composition teacher when I was at the Hartt School in the early nineties.
I always felt he was the only one at Hartt who really got me. I miss his humor and warmth.
I still have a short Instant composition he had written for me, I believe he wrote as I stood there watching. Persistent Dan. His nod to my love of Minimalism. But being true to his teaching nature he added a post script, Anyway, Persistent Dan is not Minimalist! Its Bachian!
I learned of his passing when I visited in 2017 to honor my grandparents who were co-founders of Hartt. This news was the saddest of all.
James was a great teacher and dear fiend.
Rest In Peace, James Sellars.
Daniel Berkman

Daniel Berkman

Student

April 9, 2020

I studied Composition with James in the late 70s and early 80s; no teacher had a more profound impact on me. I even had the privilege of living in that vibrant house on Albany Ave. for one year, renting a room on the top floor. It was a heady experience for a young composer -- James was not just a musician but an artistic thinker, a composer whose work brimmed with ideas. He understood and responded to his times in ways I still find ingenious. And the home he made with Gary and Robert was a haven for artistic thought, a place where both accepted and new ideas were challenged and celebrated.

For many years now I have had my head in the sand; very sad to learn that I missed James' passing.

Lawrence Dillon

September 26, 2019

Solomon Epstein

September 22, 2018

I will miss your humor. God bless, Love.

James Mason

March 29, 2017

I'm so sorry for your loss Gary and Robert. James was a shining light in Hartford. He was an inspiration to many. I have many fond memories visiting your home especially the dinner honoring Virgil Thompson and staying up to midnight waiting for the night blooming cerus to bloom.

May you Rest In Peace along with your seven lovely Aunts.

Mary Rybka-Bartholomew

March 28, 2017

In only short meetings did I know James, but in those brief moments, I cherished his creativity.

Brent Muno

March 28, 2017

James, I love you for the rest of my life. You and Gary and Robert and Finn changed everything for me. What is everything? A small part of everything is: participation (and acceptance!) in an atmosphere of genius joyful abandon, tenderness, loyalty, ravishing sensuality, ecstatic music making and and its reenactment, observing wondrous guests who were so attracted to your household (who were making special stops in Hartford), seeing how you all inspired younger people not just to achieve, but to live and vibrate. Definitely expanding and deepening my love of gay men. The sources of such gifts and energy as yours, James, can sometimes exact a price, and I know your life was not without pain and frustration. In that, you had the most beautiful companions possible, who loved you in difficult times and well as in blissful times. That taught me that enduring faithful lifetime love is not a contract.

I was lucky to have seen a comet return in my lifetime.

Ruth Miller

March 27, 2017

I am heartbroken to learn of the death of my old, dear friend and mentor, James Sellars. I consider myself unfathomably lucky to have met Jim in 1982, and to have been immediately welcomed into his extended family of musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Ever-present in my memory are the 1980s and 90s years of salon afternoons with Jim, Gary, Robert, Finn, and a coterie of genuinely original artists and intellectualsall of whom were a profoundly positive influence on my life and work. Jim was a rare man of indefatigable energy, and a great part of his legacy for me is how central the act of creating community was in his deeply humanistic aesthetic. There can be no overstatement about how honestly Jim provided a kind of elemental creative nourishment to artists of all crafts and perspectives. All of us who found ourselves in Jim's orbit sensed immediately that we were witnessing an original presence, a truly human human being who could unite in the face of difference, respect in the face of intolerance, and make new in the face of the derivative. To earn Jim Sellars' trust was to receive a gift of the most profound acceptance and support; it was an honor in the grandest sense of that word to feel one was a trusted friend. I will always remember the many years I house-sat for the Sellars household and the joy of tending gardens; dusting the endless bookshelves with enticing worlds of art, music, and poetry; writing poems at the farmhouse kitchen table; and taking phone messages, which were never routine, and often startled me, discovering Leonard Bernstein's voice on the line. I am so grateful for Jim's sparkling and remarkable presence in this world; for his enthralling music, his wit, his love of language and those who shape language, his raucous laugh, and mostly, for the elegant and authentic hand of friendship he extended to this poet and teacher as a young woman learning how to serve Art and respect those who made it. To the beautiful Sellars family, I extend my most sincere condolences on the loss of our extraordinary James.

Prof. Alexandra Burack

March 23, 2017

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