Composers Offered Grieving Friends Musical Tributes

For two of the Pacific Symphony leader’s close friends, music was the way they could best try to comfort Carl St.Clair and his wife, Susan, after the death of their son last month.

Composer Frank Ticheli and concert pianist Alain Lefevre went to the St.Clairs’ home in Laguna Beach in the days after Cole St.Clair’s drowning. They handed the grieving conductor CDs of music they had composed during the previous 18 months, music they both felt could speak to the St.Clairs more deeply than any words they could say.

Ticheli brought the Pacific Chorale’s recording--due for release on an album next spring--of his a cappella vocal piece “There Will Be Rest.” Lefevre offered his own recording of “Forever Cool Cole,” jazz piano music he had composed as a gift to the St.Clairs soon after the boy’s birth.

The text of Ticheli’s composition is from “There Will Be Rest” by the late American poet Sara Teasdale.

There will be rest, and sure stars shining . . .

A reign of rest, serene forgetting.

The music of stillness holy and low.

Praising Ticheli’s music in a review of the piece’s premiere last May at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, John Henken wrote for The Times that “the basic sense is hushed and meditative but never static, moving forward clearly and calmly.”

From his home in Pasadena, Ticheli said it indirectly owes its existence to St.Clair, his friend since 1981 when they met at the University of Michigan, where St.Clair taught and Ticheli was a graduate student. Because of St.Clair, Ticheli became composer-in-residence of the Pacific Symphony from 1991-97. That brought him to the attention of the Pacific Chorale, the Orange County group that commissioned “There Will Be Rest.”

Ticheli said he also gave St.Clair the score of the piece with the handwritten notation, “In Loving Memory of Cole Carsan St.Clair,” followed by the dates of the boy’s birth and death. When the music is published, Ticheli said, it will bear the same dedication.

“It was the best thing I could think of to do, the most important way I could pay honor to that little boy and my friends,” Ticheli said.

Already, he said, what is now his memorial to Cole St.Clair has helped comfort grieving people far from Orange County. Ticheli said “There Will Be Rest” recently won a prize at the Britten-on-the-Bay contest in New York, and that the director of that competition later told him he and his dying wife had listened to it together: “They both just sat there and held hands and cried. He informed me that his choir is going to sing it at his wife’s funeral.”

Lefevre’s music, by contrast, is all vitality and playfulness. Reached at his home in Montreal, he moved to his piano and burst through a performance of a section of “Forever Cool Cole.” It was a light-footed romp, composed with a nod to Cole Porter, after whom the boy was named.

Lefevre, a friend of St.Clair’s for more than 10 years, said he was surprised, but willing, when St.Clair asked him to play this happy piece at his son’s funeral.

“We felt it really depicted [Cole’s] character, his busyness, to a T,” St.Clair said.

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Lefevre wrote the music without having met the boy, and he titled it “For Cole.” When he visited the St.Clairs last November while appearing as a guest soloist with the Pacific Symphony, Lefevre changed the title to “For Cool Cole.”

“He had those cool eyes, like his daddy, he got that look--his eyes are always smiling,” Lefevre said. He said that as he played the piece on the St.Clairs’ piano, “Cole came onto my knees. Carl was very moved. This was a great memory.”

Lefevre, a classical performer who has worked the piece into his concerts and plans to make it a track on his first pop-jazz CD next year, said that St.Clair once showed him the baby as he slept.

“In the classical business, it’s tough to make a career. He said, ‘Alain, let me show you something. When I see that [the sleeping boy] it gives me a lot of [perspective] on all the rest.’ ”

With Cole’s death, the song’s title changed a second time, to “Forever Cool Cole.”

“It’s my way to say to Carl that I’m with him,” Lefevre said. “It’s difficult to put in words when that kind of situation arises. You can say so many times that you’re sad for them. My music, I hope, will do something [more].”

Lefevre said he won’t be able to attend St.Clair’s return to conducting the Pacific Symphony on Saturday but is glad his friend has quickly immersed himself in music-making.

“That’s wonderful. Somewhere the pain and suffering is going to come out with the music. The public can expect probably an extraordinary concert, because pain makes you go very far. I’m amazed at the amount of courage he has. The worst would be for him to decide not to get immediately into music. The only advice I gave him was, ‘Carl, I love you. Be the best. Go back and do it, man.’ ”