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Barry
Ulanov – professor of English at Barnard College
for 35 years, jazz critic, and author or editor
of close to 50 books on Christian humanism, jazz,
and other topics – has died at age 82
May
1, 2000, NEW YORK, N.Y. – Barry Ulanov, the McIntosh
Professor of English at Barnard College for more
than three decades, the author, editor or translator
of close to 50 books and more than 1,000 magazine
articles on an extraordinarily wide range of topics
ranging from jazz, to theater, Christian humanism
to French, and a spokesman for the New York City’s
arts and cultural scene, died Sunday from complications
associated with colo-rectal cancer at the age of
82. He died at 2 a.m., on the date of the Orthodox
celebration of Russian Easter, with his four children
around him, reading and praying from his favorite
Psalms.
Ulanov,
at various times an editor, a college professor,
and a jazz music producer, was a man of wide interests
who was known for telling anecdotes while shifting
in and out of the accents and dialects of different
characters. He spoke half a dozen languages (including
French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Russian) fluently
and could make his way in another 10. He lived in
New York City and in Woodbury, Conn., on the weekends
and in the summer.
Born
April 10, 1918 in Manhattan to Nathan Ulanov, concertmaster
of Toscanini's NBC Philharmonic, and Jeanette Asquith
Ulanov, Ulanov was a student at the Ethical Culture
Elementary School and was graduated as valedictorian
from Abraham Lincoln High School, in Brooklyn. He
chose to attend Columbia University, rather than
Harvard, in order to be in Harlem and close to the
heart of jazz music and culture, and received his
A.B. in 1939. His teachers included Franz Boas,
Helen Gardiner, and Lionel Trilling. One of his
roommates was Ad Rheinhardt, the modern abstract
expressionist artist.
His
first marriage, to Joan Bel Geddes, a student at
Barnard while he was at Columbia, occurred in 1939,
producing three children, Anne, Nicholas, and Katherine,
and ended in divorce in 1968. His second marriage,
that year, to Ann, produced a son, Alexander. He
is survived by his first and second wives, his four
children, and two grandchildren.
After
his freshman year at Columbia, he deliberately focused
his learning on the culture and literature of a
different country in each year - Italy, France,
Spain and Russia. Literature and music were early
interests. He was editor of the Columbia Literary
Magazine where he published the first articles of
Thomas Merton. He started writing reviews of Jazz
music in college and upon graduation was offered
the editorship of Metronome, then a flagging magazine
of classical music, which became the bible of Be-bop
culture under his leadership. He also edited Swing
(1939-1941), The Review of Recorded Music (1941-1943)
Listen (1940-1942), and the Metronome Yearbook (1950-1955),
and was a columnist for Down Beat (1955-1958).
Something
of an evangelist for jazz, Ulanov was the first
to promote and support Charlie Parker through Metronome,
which he edited from 1943-1955 and worked closely
with many Jazz musicians, producers, and critics
including Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Charlie
Mingus, Lester Young, David Brubeck, Teo Macero,
and Leonard Feather. During World War II, he emceed
armed forces radio jazz broadcasts. He wrote more
than 1,000 articles in magazines such as Vogue and
Esquire on Jazz and American culture, as well as
scripts for radio and TV. He sponsored the "Metronome
All Stars," a battle of the bands on NBC radio,
including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lennie
Tristano.
Ulanov
was the author of four books on jazz music and culture
including: "Duke Ellington" (1946), the
first biography of the bandleader and composer,
"The Incredible Crosby" (1948), "A
History of Jazz in America" (1952) which the
Saturday Review Syndicate called "the best
serious book on jazz as a developing art yet written
by an American," and "A Handbook of Jazz"
(1957) all translated into multiple languages and
reissued for decades.
In
his autobiography Miles Davis referred to Ulanov
as the only "white Mother[…] critic" who ever understood
him or Charlie Parker.
In
"A History of Jazz in America," Ulanov
wrote that the quest to define "what is American
about America" would be possible only if one
went beyond "the well-rounded emptiness of
the simple summation of a people and its culture
… It is [possible], I think, if we are willing to
explore not the single culture of Americans but
the several cultures, the cultures and the arts
of native and naturalized Americans, of Americans
from all parts of America, of VIP's and very small
people, of businessmen and ballet dancers, of jazz
musicians and gas-station attendants, of politicians
and painters, of gangsters, and college professors,
of drugstore cowboys and bona fide cattlemen, of
FBI men and Communists, of movie stars and bobby-soxers,
of professional military men and government-issue
soldiers, of psychiatrists and farmers and poets."
He
taught English Literature at Princeton University
from 1951 to 1953 and then, from 1953 to 1988 at
Barnard College, Columbia University. At Barnard,
he served in his later years as McIntosh Professor
of English, and created the Joint Program in the
Arts, enabling students to understand the connection
of all the arts, and served several times as chairman
of the English, Arts, and Religion departments,
as well as director of the program in Foreign Areas.
He was an adjunct professor of religion at Columbia
University. After retiring from Barnard College
in 1988, he taught at Union Theological Seminary
in New York City in the Department of Psychiatry
and Religion. His classes included "Mysticism
and Human Presence," and "The Inner Conversation."
In
the 1950s, Ulanov became increasingly interested
in the connection between modern art and contemporary
American culture. He completed a Ph.D. at Columbia
University in 1955 in English Literature with a
sub-specialization in Early Christian Art and a
dissertation on Alberti and perspective. He worked
as architect I.M. Pei’s sound consultant on projects
such as the mile-high shopping center in Denver,
and the Roosevelt Fields mall. He also wrote text
and read at performance of Anna Sokolow Dancers
at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Waters, and published
several volumes on modern art and contemporary American
culture including "Makers of the Modern Theater"
(1961), "The Two Worlds of American Art: The
Private and the Popular" (1965), on the private
and public spaces for aesthetic expression in the
United States, and, with James Hall, "Modern
Culture and the Arts" (1972), the first U.S.
textbook ofmodern art.
From
the mid-1950s on, he was involved along with first
wife Joan with the Catholic Church worldwide through
his presidency of the Catholic Renascence [sic]
Society, whose members included Flannery
O’Connor. With Joan, he translated "The Last
Essays of George Bernanos," and created the
St. Thomas More Society, an intellectual Catholic
discussion and meeting group. With Frank Tauritz,
he translated Joy Out of Sorrow, by Mere Marie des
Douleurs. He was an active member of Vatican II
Council, where he was involved in the translation
of the liturgy into vernacular from Latin, and he
spoke at the International Eucharistic Congress
with Pope John XXIII in Bombay in 1964.
He
published several books on Religion and culture
including "Sources & Resources: the Literary
Traditions of Christian Humanism" (1960), "Seeds
of Hope in the Modern World" (1962), and the
"Prayers of St. Augustine," and associate
editor for five volumes of "The Bridge, a Yearbook
of Judaeo-Christian Studies," published by
The Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies, Seton
Hall, from 1958 to 1963. He was author of "The
Making of a Modern Saint: A Biographical Study of
Thérèse of Lisieux" (1966).
He
was named a Guggenheim Fellow 1962-1963 and received
an Honorary Litt.D. from Villanova University in
1965.
In
the last twenty years, he concentrated on explorations
of religion and psychology, publishing over ten
books with his second wife Ann Belford Ulanov, Professor
of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological
Seminary and psychoanalyst in private practice.
Their works together included "Religion and
the Unconscious" (1975), "Primary Speech:
A Psychology of Prayer" (1982), "Transforming
Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima Animus"
(1994) and "Cinderella and her Sisters: The
Envied and the Envying"(1998). Until his death,
they co-edited the Journal of Religion and Health,
published by the Institutes of Religion and Health.
On his own, he wrote and "Jung and the Outside
World" (1992), detailing the influence of Jungian
psychoanalysis on the arts, literature and philosophy.
Ulanov
lectured extensively worldwide in Europe, Asia,
Latin America and a majority of the United States
on topics ranging from Duke Ellington’s sacred music
to the depth psychology and religion. In recent
years, he updated and in 1996 reissued his edited
volume "On Death, Wisdom and Consolation from
the World’s Great Writers." He was an advisor
to Reminiscing in Tempo, an award-winning documentary
on public television about Duke Ellington.
"The
astonishing fact is that each of us is himself or
herself and nobody else. What our imagination has
brought us to, in this meeting of knowing and unknowing,
is the eternal moment where our small being confronts
Being itself. We have something new to experience,
something new to understand," he wrote with Ann
Ulanov in "The Healing Imagination: The Meeting
of Psyche and Soul" (1982).
He
is survived by his wife Ann Belford Ulanov, and
his children: Anne Ulanov, of Poughkeepsie, a computer
support specialist at Davis Polk & Wardwell,
of New York City and Woodbury, Conn., and freelance
writer; Nicholas Ulanov, of Princeton, N.J., and
Oxford, England, President of the Ulanov Partnership,
international consultant to non-profit and art organizations
around the world; Katherine Ulanov, of New York
City, owner and designer of Nonlinear NYC; Alex
Ulanov, of New York City and Woodbury, Conn., a
consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and previously
visiting assistant professor of classics at Yale
University; and two grandchildren, through Anne
Ulanov, Amy and Mark Pietrasanta.
A
memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. on Wednesday,
May 17, at James Chapel, Union Theological Seminary,
3041 Broadway at 121st Street, New York City. The
family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations
may be sent to the Ulanov Scholarship Fund, c/o
Union Theological Seminary, 3041 Broadway, Knox
Hall 7E, New York, N.Y. 10027.
Contact:
Lucas Held, Barnard College, 212-854-7583
Alex
Ulanov, 917-743-4387
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