John Heiss, legendary New England Conservatory teacher
Even for serious students of music, the great composers of the 20th century can sometimes appear as daunting, larger-than-life figures, but John Heiss, a beloved teacher at New England Conservatory for more than 50 years, had a unique way of bringing the gods down to earth.
He had met many of them personally and had a profound grasp of their music’s technical construction, yet he also had a gift for peeling back a work’s thorny surfaces to reveal the music’s beating heart.
“He would show us the profound sadness lurking in the Bartok String Quartets, the sweet lyricism underneath all of Ives’s wild experiments, and the naked expression found in even the most challenging of atonal scores,” the conductor Joshua Weilerstein, a former student of Mr. Heiss, wrote on Facebook in a reminiscence. “Simply put, John Heiss’s classes were a joyous illumination of music.”
Mr. Heiss, who was also an accomplished flutist, composer, and conductor, died in his Auburndale home on July 28. He was 83 and had been undergoing treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital for acute myeloid leukemia.
“As a composer, conductor, and performer, John Heiss embodied the complete musician we’re trying to build at New England Conservatory,” said Andrea Kalyn, the school’s president. “His singular approach combined a high rigor with a sense of joyful connection through music.”
“At NEC he was an icon of a figure, and generations of young people felt he was their mentor,” said the violist Kim Kashkashian, a longtime friend and colleague. “He had the utmost discernment always, an ability to pick out what could be seen better, done better, felt in a better way, but he never judged anyone, which is an extraordinary quality.”
Over the years, Mr. Heiss performed as a flutist with the Boston Chamber Music Society, Collage New Music, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among other ensembles. As a composer, his works received premieres by Boston Musica Viva, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and Speculum Musicae, among others, and his music was recorded on the Albany and CRI labels.
In a review of a 1982 performance of Mr. Heiss’s “Songs of Nature,” Globe classical music critic Richard Dyer observed that “each [song] is as particular as a haiku, but a curiously swerving one — playfulness informs high seriousness, and even the best musical jokes have substance.”
John Heiss was born in New York City in 1938 and grew up in Bronxville, N.Y. His perfect pitch and his exceptional ear were spotted by the time he was 3, when he politely asked his preschool teacher why she was playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” using different notes on the piano than the ones his mother used when playing it at home (in a different key).
His pitch memory and gift for hearing would distinguish him as a musician for the rest of his life.
Years later, while studying music in New York City, Mr. Heiss had the opportunity to observe the rehearsal of a complex new work by Igor Stravinsky in the composer’s presence. After Mr. Heiss had identified several wrong notes coming from deep inside the swirling orchestral textures, Stravinsky turned to him and asked, “Are you the pitch doctor?”
Mr. Heiss graduated from Lehigh University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and, after additional coursework in music at Columbia University, he later earned an master’s of fine arts in music at Princeton University, where his composition teachers included Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Darius Milhaud.
He came to Boston in 1967 at the invitation of composer Gunther Schuller, who had taken over as president of NEC and, by attracting a generation of faculty that included violinist Rudolf Kolisch, the pianist Russell Sherman, and Mr. Heiss, among others, ushered in a golden age for the school.
Once he arrived, Mr. Heiss was placed in charge of the school’s Contemporary Ensemble, and in that role he organized what soon became a signal tradition of ambitious weeklong festivals focusing on the defining figures of 20th-century music, many of whom then came to campus. They included Witold Lutoslawski, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Sir Michael Tippett, and Elliott Carter.
In 1964, Mr. Heiss married Arlene Tubio, who died in 2011. They shared a passion for sailing and were decades-long members of Community Boating. A social worker, teacher, and a fund-raiser in development offices, she was also a musician and once asked Mr. Heiss to compose a piece for flute and percussion that their two children could perform when they were teenagers.
“She was so original and so funny and so full of life force,” Mr. Heiss told the Globe in 2011 for her obituary. “She had an intellect and a sense of the arts, an eye for color, and an ear for sound.”
The couple’s son, Frank Carter Heiss, died in 2018. Mr. Heiss leaves his daughter, Laura Heiss Varas of Rye, N.Y.; his brother, Thomas Clay Heiss of Webster, N.Y.; and three grandchildren.
NEC will celebrate Mr. Heiss’s life and legacy with a free tribute concert in Jordan Hall at a date to be announced.
Speaking by phone with the Globe, his daughter, Laura, praised his kindness and his boundless curiosity about what was coming next.
She also recalled some parenting advice he had recently offered after hearing her correcting some wrong notes her daughter was playing during a practice session at the piano: “When you correct the wrong notes,” he cautioned, “it interrupts all the right notes that are coming.”
She said that “all his life he was focused on the right notes that are coming, the right notes that are coming. They are the notes of the future, and, as he always said, they are the most beautiful.”