Eclectic Company: Goodbye to Maestro Kushner

Four years ago Lauren de Albuquerque signed me up to write about music for her new venture, The Jambalaya News, where along with goodbyes to musical mentors, heroes and friends, I’ve been able to usher in new music and new performers to the homes of readers. In these pages, I’ve mostly been able to applaud musicians during their lifetimes. But today I’m taking leave of a vital musical force, Maestro William David Kushner, whose importance to the Symphonies he conducted for more than thirty years in Lake Charles and Alexandria was and is profound, and whose importance to me is greater than the sum total of our encounters over the dozen years that I knew him.

For some of the time, while I was briefly on the Lake Charles Symphony board for instance, he was Maestro Kushner, with all the ceremony and awe that title inspired. But most of the time, through our participation in the Jewish community of Lake Charles’ Reform congregation Temple Sinai, he was Bill, who read portions of the Haggadah with attentive clarity at the Passover seders we attended, and whose achingly beautiful rendering on the clarinet of “Kol Nidre,” the prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, could almost suppress my longing to be home in New York with family on the High Holiday.

Bill Kushner’s birthday was the day before mine, and when he died in 2012, just a few days shy of his 88th birthday, I was in Edinburgh, Texas, meeting the POSSLQ’s family for the first time, and unable to return to Lake Charles for the funeral. I had watched Bill’s health decline slowly for a few years before that, whenever I spent my gradually diminishing time in Lake Charles. Though tired and ill, Bill never failed to tease me about our work together whenever we met. He had been the Temple Sinai Sunday School Principal, and I became one of the school’s volunteer teachers after I moved to Lake Charles in the summer of 2000. My appearance, first as a substitute, and then as a regular, was the signal that Bill could transfer his focus from the classroom to rehearsing a score he would soon be conducting. While I taught history or Hebrew to a handful of children in a small classroom, Bill would spread out his music on the giant formica-covered table in the Temple’s social hall and read through all the parts, marking the score with a pencil, his eyes focused far away on the music, clearly audible in his mind. When I watched him conduct those same charts for the Symphony, watching his alert back and purposefully moving hands, I always believed that he was listening simultaneously to the orchestra playing before him, and to the imaginary orchestra he’d rehearsed with in preparation.

One year, Rabbi Charles Isbell asked me to sing the “Kol Nidre” prayer for the Yom Kippur service, Bill having by then laid down both his baton and clarinet. It’s my favorite musical selection from all of Jewish liturgy, so I was eager to sing it, and to get it just right. Months before the Days of Awe, as these most important of Jewish holidays are called, I asked Bill for advice about “Kol Nidre,” and he loaned me his lightly annotated score for the song. As it happened, I became ill and never got to sing it, but I can’t forget Bill’s kindness in discussing how I could work through the vocal line, and pledging availability if I needed more coaching.

So when I heard that the family would hold an unveiling of Bill’s tombstone on the first anniversary of his death, the POSSLQ and I rearranged our travel plans so I could be there at the Jewish Cemetery on the morning of March 11th. At an unveiling, the newly erected stone is covered with a cloth, and a gathering of family and friends, with or without the participation of a Rabbi, recites prayers, speaks eulogies, and reveals the newly carved stone. Just before leaving, each attendee files past the grave for a private farewell, placing a rock on the stone instead of flowers, for remembrance. I stood listening to Rabbi Weinstein, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and stepped forward through the gravestones of generations of Kushners who had contributed much to the cultural life of Lake Charles, to whisper a goodbye and to place my rock on the polished black granite stone.

Later that night, clarinetist Jan Scott, playing Bill’s own instrument, and a string quartet led by violinist Michael Buckles, performed, as Bill had requested shortly before his death, the Mozart and Brahms quintets for clarinet and strings, in McNeese University’s Ralph Squires Auditorium. French horn player Eric Kushner, Bill’s younger son, gave a brief but moving introduction to the evening, apologizing for the absence of his older brother, who’d been thwarted from coming and speaking as he’d planned by a sudden, debilitating ailment. Those who lived in Lake Charles with Bill knew or knew of his late first wife, Sylvia, who was principal bassoonist for the New York City Opera, of his extraordinarily talented children – Lesley, the painter, Tony, the playwright, and Eric, the musician – of his second wife Marsha, the self-described Symphony “groupie” who’d shared Bill’s last years. At the unveiling, at the concert, and at the receptions that followed each, Bill’s oldest and youngest children reminisced with family and old friends, comforting others and accepting condolences.

I asked Lesley if she could identify some revealing action or comment of her father’s that influenced her painting, many fine examples of which hang all around Bill’s home. “The best advice my dad gave me was ‘find what you love and the rest will fall into place,’” she shared later in an email from home. “I knew that had happened for him when he fell in love with music at age 14. He found his calling and his purpose in music. Other than that general, yet heartfelt advice, he left it to me to decide what that love might be.” I read that email in Lake Charles, in another home that houses Lesley Kushner paintings. Staring as I did then, at two vibrant examples of her emotional floral works, I glimpsed Bill Kushner’s living legacy. But we miss you, Maestro.

Back to Articles Index