Carlton Gamer Obituary

Gamer
Carlton Gamer
February 13, 1929
July 14, 2023

Carlton Gamer, American composer, music theorist, and peace activist, passed away at his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on July 14. He was 94.
"This gentle, tolerant, and brilliant man, my longtime friend and colleague, was the most deeply learned person I've known," said conductor Donald Jenkins, Gamer's long-time colleague. Another colleague, composer Ofer Ben-Amots, said that his thoughts about Gamer would sound like a cliché, "because Carlton was truly a great humanist, one-of-a-kind in every way, a brilliant mind, and a remarkable composer who regularly embedded serious mathematical thought into his music."
Gamer was born February 13, 1929 in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in several Illinois towns where his father Carl was a Methodist minister. (Carl later taught political science at Monmouth College in Illinois.) His mother, Alice Michael Gamer, was a sculptor.
Gamer's musical talent was apparent early, and he had an extensive background in piano and composition by the time he attended Northwestern University. At Boston University, where he obtained his Master's in music in 1951, Gamer studied composition with Gardner Read and musicology with Karl Geiringer. He completed his private composition studies in 1957 with Roger Sessions.
In 1950 Gamer married Eleanor Everett Watts, the former wife of English writer (and early New Age guru) Alan Watts, who was then an Episcopal priest at Northwestern. They had a son, Michael. The next year the family moved to New York City where Carlton founded a performer's workshop called "The Seven" – a play on the Russian "Mighty Five" and the French "Les Six" – that included jazz musician Robert Durough, future Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and musicologist and recorder player Erich Katz.
Gamer joined the music faculty at Colorado College in 1954 as piano accompanist for the dance department, where he worked with choreographer Hanya Holm. Within a few years his responsibilities expanded to teaching music history, music theory, and composition before his retirement as full professor in 1994. He also taught at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and at the Salzburg Global Seminar.
When Gamer came of age as a composer, the serial procedures invented by German composer Arnold Schoenberg were in ascendance. Gamer – already interested in mathematics – enthusiastically embraced this world. But although Gamer's compositions are mathematically rigorous, they are rarely austere, and Gamer was always moving the boundaries of Schoenberg's system.
"His works were so well thought out from a theoretical and intellectual point of view without destroying the sheer beauty of the language," said pianist Susan Grace, who has probably performed more of Gamer's music than anyone else. The piano solo "Quietly, With Feeling" quotes Mendelssohn within a strict serial rhythmic structure, while "Piano Raga Music" takes the opposite approach, combining 12-tone pitch structure with rhythmic ideas drawn from Gamer's extensive knowledge of the music of India. Much of Gamer's later music is based on all-trichord sets – 12-note sets containing all 12 possible three-note chordal structures – an approach that enabled him to quote freely from earlier music.
Gamer cited four 20th Century composers as influential in his work: Paul Hindemith, for showing him an alternative approach to harmony and harmonic progression; Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky, for their approach to rhythm and the non-traditional means they used to assert tonality; and Alban Berg, for his use of modern compositional techniques in a tonal way.But he was also deeply influenced by earlier music, and it's characteristic that the composer whose work he listened to in his final hours was Brahms, whose music is also an elaborate dance between intellectual rigor and creative freedom. Gamer once told British mathematician Robin Wilson, "I don't expect that audiences will understand the underlying mathematics, but I do hope that they will realize that there's something going on underneath and will want to hear the piece again." Composer Mark Arnest recalls a slightly different formulation of that idea: "Carlton said every piece you wrote had to be two pieces – the piece people heard the first time, and the piece people heard the tenth time."
Gamer's most important work in music theory is contained in two frequently cited papers from 1967 – "Some Combinational Resources of Equal Tempered Systems" and "Deep Scales and Difference Sets in Equal-Tempered Systems" – that explored the mathematical ramifications of scales. He worked extensively with microtonal systems (scales with more than 12 notes) and designed a 19-tone equal tempered keyboard.
In addition to knowing his subject matter, Gamer was an expert at teaching it. Robin Wilson recalls a "spectacular presentation" Gamer gave on an alto aria from Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust." As a high school student, conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong made a four-hour monthly commute to study privately with Gamer. "Every lesson was an entire day affair that included everything from score study, to theory, to listening exercises, to improvisation, and finally to talking about my compositions," he said. "I can't overstate how profound an impact he had on my musical training."
Gamer also made discoveries in pure mathematics, which mathematician John Watkins wrote up in an article, Trapezoids, Primes, and Cousins. "Primes of course are defined by a purely multiplicative property," said Watkins. "What is remarkable about Carlton's discovery is that it gives us an alternate definition of primes in terms of the additive structure of the integers."
A lifetime pacifist, in 1955 Gamer (along with his wife and Colorado College professors Glenn and Ursula Gray) founded the Colorado Springs branch of the Society of Friends. "He combined his Quakerism with his Buddhist practice and was deeply steeped in both of these worlds," said author Linda Seger. "He was a gentle and wise soul – discerning, empathetic, and a steady guiding hand for the entire history of the Colorado Springs Friends Meeting."
In the 1960s he worked with the Urban League in Colorado Springs, helping detect housing discrimination against African-Americans. During this period he was also counseling college students. "Carlton helped a lot with the draft-counseling operation we had here in the late '60s and '70s," said colleague Owen Cramer, "clarifying what counted as conscientious objection and what was simple anti-war commitment." Activist Loring Wirbel called Gamer "a reliable ally on peace and justice issues, someone who could be counted on for following through."
Gamer is survived by his brother Robert Emmanuel Gamer, his son Michael, step-daughters Joan Watts and Ann Watts, and his partner Elaine Freed.
There will be two services: One at 10 a.m. on Saturday, August 12 at the Quaker Meeting House, 950 E. Cimarron Street. Colorado College will also host a service at 11 a.m. on Saturday September 9 at the Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center Room 130 (Flex Room).