Meyer Kupferman

Meyer Kupferman, a prolific composer whose music embraced both jazz and 12-tone techniques, died Nov. 26 near Rhinebeck, N.Y. He was 77 and lived in Rhinebeck.

The cause was heart failure, said William Anderson, a guitarist who has performed Mr. Kupferman ' s music and is a friend of the family.

Mr. Kupferman embraced virtually every form available to contemporary composers, writing 12 symphonies, nine ballets and seven operas, along with electronic pieces, works that combine taped sounds and live instruments and soundtrack music for films. He composed 10 concertos, dozens of picturesque orchestral works and more than 200 chamber and solo works.

He was omnivorous stylistically, too, a quality he traced back to childhood memories of his father ' s singing Yiddish and Romanian songs to him, which he would imitate on the clarinet, an instrument that he also used to imitate solos in the big band jazz he heard on the radio.

He embodied some of these influences as well as elements of the Serialism that fascinated him later in " The Garden of My Father ' s House, " a vibrant 1972 work for violin and clarinet dedicated to his father ' s memory.

Those influences can be heard, in different proportions, in many of his other works.

Mr. Kupferman was born in New York on July 3, 1926. After a brief encounter with the violin, at age 5, he was drawn to the clarinet when he was 10. He studied at the High School of Music and Art and at Queens College, but although his formal studies embraced music theory and orchestral and chamber performance he regarded himself as a self-taught composer.

Practical considerations dictated the shape of his early career. Working as a jazz clarinetist in clubs on Coney Island, he began scoring arrangements for the bands he performed with, and for other musicians.

By the late 1940s, when he was in his early 20s, he began concentrating on concert music. He wrote the first of several piano concertos in 1948, also the year he completed his first opera, a one-act children ' s work, " In a Garden, " based on Gertrude Stein ' s " First Reader. "

To hear his music performed, he persuaded some of his colleagues to form an orchestra, called Composers Workshop. Among the members of the ensemble who eventually became well-known composers were Morton Feldman, Allan Blank and Seymour Shifrin.

When Mr. Kupferman became interested in 12-tone composition in the 1950s, he sought ways to retain the lyricism that had been an attraction of his earlier music. One solution was to develop a single tone row that through repetition in several works would become familiar. Another was to temper it with some of the influences that had always given his music its particular accent.

These solutions propel the " Cycle of Infinities, " a set of more than 30 works, composed between 1961 and 1983. All 30 were based on the same tone row, but the works could hardly have been more different. Among them were full-length recitals for solo instruments, chamber pieces, a cantata and a three-act opera, " The Judgement " (1966).

The jazz of Mr. Kupferman ' s youth continued to interest him. Several works including many of the " Infinities " call for a jazz ensemble. His String Quartet No. 6 bore the title " Jazz Quartet, " and when his " Jazz Symphony " was given its premiere by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in 1988, he said it was a piece that he had been wanting to write for 40 years.

In addition to composing, Mr. Kupferman taught composition and directed an improvisatory ensemble at Sarah Lawrence College from 1951 to 1993. He also published " Atonal Jazz " (Dorn) a two-volume study of chromatic techniques in contemporary jazz in 1992.

Mr. Kupferman is survived by his wife, Pei Fen; daughter, Lisa Pitt, of Putnam, N.Y.; stepsons, Fung Chin and Sung Chin, of Westfield, N.J., and Yung Chin, of Chappaqua, N.Y.; and five grandchildren.