Funeral Rites Set for L.A. Music Scene’s G. A. Kuyper

A memorial service has been scheduled Aug. 30 for George A. Kuyper, former general director of the Hollywood Bowl Assn. and Southern California Assn., who died earlier this month at age 88 in Santa Ana.

Kuyper had been living in Orange County since leaving the associations in 1963. They sponsor the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hollywood Bowl seasons.

He was selected for the Los Angeles positions in 1959 after a nationwide search and came here from Chicago, where he had spent 16 years as manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Before that he was manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Kuyper was born in Paterson, N.J., and studied at Rutgers. He was valedictorian of his graduating class the year singer-actor Paul Robeson was salutatorian.

Kuyper did graduate work in English at Harvard and then taught literature at Michigan, New York and Boston universities and was working on a doctorate at Harvard when he was offered a staff position with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

He accepted it briefly but then returned to teaching. Finally, Kuyper, an amateur pianist and violinist, decided to make music his career and rejoined the famed Boston orchestra, where he described his job as associate manager as being to keep the volatile orchestra conductor, Serge Koussevitzky, out of the business office.

He told The Times in a 1959 interview that he guessed he had mildly succeeded in that task, because it was Koussevitzky who recommended him for the Chicago post.

After retiring from his dual position in Los Angeles, he became a consultant to the Ford Foundation, allocating more than $80 million in grants to orchestras throughout the nation before retiring for good in 1967.

He is survived by his wife, Mildred, two sons and four grandchildren.

The memorial will be held at Orange Coast Unitarian-Universalist Church in Costa Mesa at 2 p.m.