The Great Neck Choral Society

PROFILE

Michael Leavitt:
'I knew I was going
to be in music' 8-8-05

That certainty came to Michael Leavitt when he was a 5th-grader at the Arrandale School in Great Neck. Unlike many youthful visions, this one stuck. Michael became a precocious instrumentalist, then a choral singer. Then he became an entrepreneur in the music business. But he never stopped making music, and he has been singing tenor in GNCS for the last 36 years.

Born in Manhattan, where his father was in the garment industry, Michael came to Great Neck at age 10 after two intermediate moves by his family, to Jackson Heights and Little Neck. He arrived to find his 4th-grade class reviewing long division, a subject totally new to him after attending city schools. "My father had to teach me long division," he says.

Michael's mother played the piano and that exposure may have helped turn him toward music a year later. Just as important were the musical opportunities offered by the school. "I was interested in the saxophone," he says, "but there are several kinds of sax's, and I wasn't sure which one to choose. Then someone told me he had heard that Mr. Cleve, the band director, needed a tenor sax player. I chose tenor sax."

His choice got him into the band halfway through 5th grade, but it carried a price. The tenor sax is a big instrument--in its case it weighs 25 pounds--for a little kid "and I was a little kid," says Michael. For the first year, he wheeled it to school in a shopping cart. And even today, his left hand displays calluses that he says he probably got from carrying the case in those early days.

In the sixth grade, Michael switched to clarinet because he wanted to be able to play in the orchestra as well as the band. Later, in high school, he got interested in choral music. "I discovered that you can sight read with the voice," he says.

It was in 6th grade that Michael started organizing ensembles and bands of his own and playing in outside bands as well. He also started arranging music. "My friends wanted to play rock-and-roll songs, and there were no instrumental parts for them," he says. So he bought the sheet music for a song and started writing out the parts for various instruments. "I learned by trial and error," he says.

By that time he had also learned to play the flute and had started on guitar. From 6th grade on, "I practiced three to four hours a day," he says. "I was not a very good student. I had no interest in academics."

Playing with the 'pros'

When he was 13 or 14, Michael, through a connection with a professional musician who was teaching him, Paul Ricci, began to play with members of the Skitch Henderson band on weekends, when they weren't playing on the Tonight show. "They said, 'Let the kid sit in,'" Michael recalls. He remembers being awed by what professionals could do--in particular attending a recording session in which the musicians recorded 28 different commercial jingles in a single three-hour session. "They would read it through once," he says, "then record it."

Later, another musician, Arthur Christmann, who taught at Juilliard, began to groom Michael for what he envisioned would eventually be the job of second clarinetist for the New York Philharmonic, then held by Stanley Drucker. Fortunately, "I did not count on that," Michael says. "It's been almost 50 years," he says, "and Stanley Drucker (now principal clarinetist) is still there."

By the time high-school graduation drew near, Michael says, "I had become enamored of chorus," and that's what he wanted to study in college. Choral programs did not flourish in Eastern colleges, he says, and he ended up being "recruited" by Kansas Wesleyan University, which had a very good choral program. In his freshman year--he remembers the exact date--he met Nancy Redden, a farm girl from Kansas also majoring in music. She was the soprano in a quartet in which he was the tenor. "It took me a week or two to fall for her," he recalls. Sixteen months later they married, and by the time they graduated they had already had their first child, Amy.

When they returned to New York in 1965, Michael took a job as a substitute music teacher. Later he taught choral music in Seaford and other music subjects in a number of colleges on Long Island, as well as Hunter College in Manhattan. During this period he worked on a master's degree in musicology at Queens College. In 1965 Michael and his family, who had been living in Baldwin, moved to Great Neck, lured by the schools there. By that time Michael's parents were living in a house on Steamboat Rd., and after he converted it to a two-family house, that's where the younger Leavitts moved in.

Michael and Nancy wanted to sing and were interested in GNCS. But at that time, he says, they couldn't afford the $25 dues. They attended a rehearsal anyway. The conductor at the time was George Rose, who had been Michael's 7th-grade music teacher. Reportedly, Mr. Rose told a Board member afterward, "I want those two," and the chorus waived the dues. "He could tell that we could sightread like mad," says Michael.

At that time, Michael had just started doctoral work at City University of New York. He eventually did all the work and started a dissertation on the music of Stephen Foster, but he never finished. One reason was a fateful encounter with Gregg Smith. At first, Michael merely became a tenor in "a Long Island branch" of the Gregg Smith Singers. But by 1978 he was managing Mr. Smith's six-week Adirondack Festival of American Music (where he first met Virginia Davidson), and he then took over as manager for Gregg Smith Singers--ending his teaching career and starting a new career in arts management./p>

Switching to a business career

From there it was only a short step to becoming an entrepreneur. He founded Allied Arts Bureau, with Gregg Smith Singers as its first client. Two years later, he founded another company, MPL Productions, to do advertising in the music business. He did that, he says, "because I was mad at the New York Times." Running an advertising agency, he qualified for the standard 15% discount on space rates that the Times would not give him as a promoter. MPL, according to Michael, was among the first agencies to do "concept" advertising for the arts. The music world, he says, was very conservative and its advertising quite stolid. His firm helped open things up.

In 1990, after selling his management agency, Michael bought a piece of Empire Music Corp., a fledgling national distributor of CDs, and running that company is his principal work now. However, he still produces occasional concerts, including those of Amor Artis, a chorus directed by Johannes Somary, a former director of GNCS. Michael and Nancy also sing in the Amor Artis chorus. A few years ago, Michael became president of the American Society for Jewish Music, which publishes a journal and holds seminars for scholars of Jewish music.

Though Michael played in bands all through college, once he graduated that was pretty much the end of instrumental music for him--until about four years ago. After a "30-year layoff," he says, "I missed it," especially as he listened to some of the Big Band music he was distributing. He dug out his saxophone and his clarinet and began to practice. The fingers seem to retain some muscle memory, he says, "but they are slower." He now practices about 10 hours a week. He is a member of the well-regarded Band of Long Island, for which he dons a snappy red uniform and participates in up to 10 performances a year, mainly to raise money for charities.

So, singing and playing, Michael continues to realize his childhood ambition. For spouse Nancy, life took a different turn after her music degree. She stayed home with the kids--there was a second daughter, Sarah--until the oldest was about 12. The musical environment rubbed off on both girls: Amy was a flutist and Sarah a drummer, and both sang. Then Nancy went to work and back to school. She took a master's degree in Speech at Adelphi University and taught as a speech pathologist at the Wantagh Elementary School for nearly 10 years. Then she took a second master's degree in Library Science at C.W. Post College and is now a librarian in that same Wantagh school.

Both of the Leavitts have made significant contributions to GNCS. Michael steps in to conduct rehearsals from time to time. And Nancy, in the 1980s, served as president for a term of nine years--more than twice as long as anyone else has been willing to stick it out. As one chorister noted recently, "People join a chorus to sing, not to run things, so her dedication was remarkable."

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