Gail Kubik

Biography

Gail Thompson Kubik (September 5, 1914 – July 20, 1984) was an American composer, music director, violinist, and teacher.
He first gained widespread recognition for his scores for World War II documentary films, including Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944). He is best remembered for winning the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Symphony Concertante, and for his score for Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Early life and education

Kubik was born in South Coffeyville, Oklahoma, the second of three sons to Henry and Evalyn O. Kubik, a singer who had studied with Schumann-Heink. In the 1930s his mother and her sons formed the Kubik Ensemble (Gail on violin, Howard on piano, and Henry Jr. on cello) and toured the midwest. All three brothers studied at the Eastman School of Music, where Kubik studied composition with Howard Hanson and violin with Samuel Belov and Scott Willits. It is likely that Kubik played violin in Eastman's orchestra, taking part in the American Composers' Concerts and getting nationally broadcast on NBC. Kubik graduated with distinction in 1934 in a class that included Wayne Barlow and Kent Kennan.
Kubik then received his master's degree in music in 1935 at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, where he studied with Leo Sowerby. He studied one year in 1937–1938 towards a doctorate in music at Harvard University where he studied with Walter Piston and Nadia Boulanger.
He was a prodigy; at the time becoming Eastman's youngest graduate (in both violin and composition), the youngest student admitted to Harvard's doctoral program, and the youngest MacDowell Colony fellow.

Career

His professional career began with a series of teaching engagements. He first taught violin and composition at Monmouth College (where his brother taught cello) from 1935/1936. He then taught composition and music history at Dakota Wesleyan University from 1936/1937. In 1938 he moved to New York City and taught for two years at Columbia University Teachers College. From 1940 he taught at the Rand School and at Finch Junior College. Among his students included Gordon Binkerd and Marjorie Merryman.
In 1940 he joined NBC Radio in New York as staff composer. In the 17 weeks before his contract expired in 1941, he contributed scores for The World Is Yours and Great Plays series, and for the NBC 1940 Christmas program Puck. In this year he also composed incidental music for Max Catto's play They Walk Alone.
In 1941 he composed the score the short documentary film Men and Ships, which was produced by George Gercke for the United States Maritime Commission. The score was a success, and Kubik conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the work's radio premiere. This success lead to his 1942 recruitment by the Office of War Information's Motion Picture Bureau to be their Director of Music, working for Lowell Mellett. He moved to Hollywood where he composed and conducted the music for many of the OWI's films, most notably The World At War, and supervised other composers in their work for the OWI (including Virgil Thomson, Morton Gould, Paul Creston, Arthur Kreutz, and Gene Forrell).
In 1943 he joined the Army Air Corps, attaining a rank of corporal, and worked in the First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City. For the FMPU he scored hundreds of training films, often resorting to stock scores, and recorded by the Air Forces Orchestra from the AAF First Radio Unit. He worked with fellow composers Alexander Steinert and David Rose. His best successes in this period were the scores for William Wyler's films The Memphis Belle in 1944 and Thunderbolt! in 1945, written during an overseas assignment in England.
In 1943, he was a board member of the Los Angeles-based Musicians' Congress Committee (along with Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud, Lena Horne, William Grant Still and other musical luminaries). This committee was formed and sponsored by Max Silver with a goal of promoting American art music during the war, and was suspected of being a Communist front.
During his time in Hollywood during the war, he came to understand that Hollywood studios had an obstinate dependence on or expectation for a conservative musical vocabulary. Summarizing his own experiences, as well as those of his colleagues Copland and Thomson, he concluded that in the absence of creative or understanding Hollywood studio heads, documentaries offered the "serious" composer the only real opportunity to break into the film business.
In 1949 he would compose the two works for which he is ultimately best remembered today. The first was the score for the film C-Man, produced by Irving Lerner, a former OWI colleague. Kubik later reworked this score into the Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Symphony Concertante. The second was the score for UPA's Academy-award winning animated short Gerald McBoingBoing, produced by John Hubley, a former FMPU colleague.
These successes earned Kubik the Rome Prize in 1950, which began a two year residency at the American Academy in Rome. His co-fellows during this time included Ulysses Kay, Harold Shapero, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, Leo Smit, George Rochberg, and Frank Wigglesworth Jr. During this period he completed his score for the film Two Gals And A Guy, and finished the score for his Symphony Concertante. Upon the completion of his fellowship, Kubik remained in Rome, where he created a concert version of the Gerald McBoingBoing score, and composed the score for Philip Stapp's avant-garde animation Transatlantico. He returned to America in 1954 to again work with Wyler to score The Desperate Hours.
His score for Desperate Hours was drastically cut from the film under studio executive pressure, and he vowed never to work in Hollywood again.
Kubik frequently took material from his documentary and functional music and directly used or reworked it for his concert music. This took the common form of rearranging scores for eponymous concert suites, but also incorporation into otherwise unrelated concert works like symphonies and piano works. This would also be the case for two of his most recognized works, the Symphony Concertante and the score for Gerald McBoingBoing. In 1949 he composed the music for the film.
He was an editor for Mercury Music Corporation, editing their American Music for Piano series. From 1970 until 1980, he was composer-in-residence at Scripps College in Claremont, California. He also lectured.

Artists' rights

Kubik was one of the few 'serious' American composers who recognized and appreciated the vast audience (and licensing fees) that the field of original radio, TV, and film scores could provide, and the quality of music that he and his classically trained peers could provide. He lamented of the "highway robbery" that broadcast networks perpetrated by limiting composers' fees and copyrights. He was frequently involved in the securing publication and performing rights for himself, often struggling against larger and less compromising entities. In 1945 Kubik had successfully sued the membership organization American Composers' Alliance for selling the license to his music to BMI in 1944 without his consent. The case was decided by the New York Supreme Court.
Where possible, Kubik was careful to structure his contracts with film studios so that he retained the rights to the scores. This was how he was able to rework the score for C-Man into his Pulitzer-winning Symphony Concertante. At times it resulted in retracting completed scores, when the studio refused to grant rights. His score for 1955's The Desperate Hours was lauded by peers and audiences, but was drastically cut by Paramount's head Don Hartman. Two years later, in an unprecedented move, Paramount returned the music rights to Kubik, and produced the recording of a new suite derived on the score titled Scenario for Orchestra.
In another example, in 1962, Anatole de Grunwald hired Kubik to score I Thank A Fool. Kubik refused to sign a contract unless he retained the music rights; however production (and funding) proceeded anyway on the score and recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. With the final mix ready to deliver, MGM still refused to relinquish music rights to Kubik, Kubik pulled his music and involvement from the film, with the studio left with the music production bill. The music was later repurposed into his composition Scenes for Orchestra.
Between his 1952 Pulitzer Prize, and the success of his score for UPA's Gerald McBoing-Boing, his reputation was such that in 1953 he signed a lucrative guaranteed publishing contract with ASCAP's Chappell Music. The musical trades positioned this deal as part of an ongoing competition between ASCAP and BMI (also mired in antitrust litigation at the same time) for the prestige of signing contracts with respected composers.

Personal life

Kubik was married and divorced four times. From 1963 to 1983 he frequently lived in Venasque, France, where he had purchased and renovated several homes. One of these homes is now owned by Darius Brubeck.
He died aged 69 in Covina, California, after a lengthy hospitalization with kala-azar, contracted during a trip to Africa.

Awards and honors

He was awarded the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Symphony Concertante.
He was twice a Guggenheim fellow for composition, in 1944 and 1965. He was a Rome Prize winner in 1950, and his subsequent fellowship in Rome lasted two years; he would return as a guest artist in 1965, 1972, and 1975.
He was a permanent fellow at MacDowell arts colony, having first been awarded a fellowship in 1936. He was artist in residence at Yaddo in 1948 (at same time as Patricia Highsmith, Marc Brandel, Bob White, Clifford Wright, Irene Orgel, Chester Himes, Vivien MacLeod, Harold Shapero, Stanley Levine, and Flannery O'Connor).
He was the dedicatee of Ingolf Dahl's 1944 Music for Brass Instruments. The work's final fugue movement's second theme is a notational representation of Kubik's army serial number 32824096.
He was one of the composers interviewed for Irwin Bazelon's book Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music.
He was a National Patron of the professional music fraternity Delta Omicron, member of the American Society of University Composers and American Society of Music Arrangers. The National Association of American Composers and Conductors awarded him a citation in 1943 for "direction of music in important Government films". He was on the national advisory board for the University of Missouri–Kansas City's Institute for Studies in American Music founded in 1967.
A major archive of his works and papers were originally held by the Library of Congress, but have since moved to Kansas State University.

Operas

Boston Baked Beans: An Opera Piccola (1952), a refashioning of his score for The Miner's Daughter
A Mirror for the Sky (a folk opera, first performed 1957)

Radio, film, and TV scores

Men and Ships (1940)
Colleges at War (1942), written for OWI
Manpower (1942), written for OWI
Paratroops (1942), written for OWI. Kubik also arranged this score into a concert suite.
The World at War (1942), written for OWI
Dover (1942, aka Dover Front Line), written for OWI
Earthquakers (1943), written for FMPU
Air Pattern-Pacific (1944), written for FMPU
The Memphis Belle (1944), written for FMPU
Thunderbolt (1945), written for FMPU, but not released to general public until 1947
C-Man (1949), including the song Do It Now, written with Larry Neill.
Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950 UAP cartoon based on a story by Dr. Seuss); Kubik composed also a longer version which is sometimes performed as a narrated concert piece with Dr. Seuss's text
The Miner's Daughter (1950), a UAP cartoon short
Two Gals and a Guy (1951, aka Baby and Me) (incidental music, also served as musical director)
Transatlantico: Una corsa attraversa la storia (1952), often titled Transatlantic: A Short Cut Through History, score for a Philip Stapp cartoon that was a Marshall Plan film
The Desperate Hours (1955). Additional music by Daniele Amfitheatrof (uncredited)
"The Silent Sentinel" and "Hiroshima", episodes of The 20th Century. (1958)
I Thank a Fool (1962) This score was later replaced by Ron Goodwin
Leopold the See-Through Crumbpicker (1969), a Gene Deitch animation of a James Flora book. The music was ultlimately not used for the score, but repurposed into his Divertimento III.
The Eisenhower Years (1970), produced by Kansas State University for National Educational Radio, incorporates music previously composed for The Silent Sentinel
Music for Bells