LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tom Lehrer, the favored and erudite tune satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Chilly Battle, then largely deserted his music profession to return to instructing math at Harvard and different universities, has died. He was 97.
Longtime pal David Herder mentioned Lehrer died Saturday at his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He didn’t specify a reason behind dying.
Lehrer had remained on the mathematics college of the College of California at Santa Cruz effectively into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his personal copyright, granting the general public permission to make use of his lyrics in any format with none charge in return.
A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math diploma from the establishment at age 18), Lehrer quickly turned his very sharp thoughts to outdated traditions and present occasions. His songs included “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Old Dope Peddler” (set to a tune paying homage to “The Old Lamplighter”), “Be Prepared” (by which he mocked the Boy Scouts) and “The Vatican Rag,” by which Lehrer, an atheist, poked on the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. (Pattern lyrics: “Get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries. Bow your head with great respect, and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.”)
Accompanying himself on piano, he carried out the songs in a colourful model paying homage to such musical heroes as Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim, the latter a lifelong pal. Lehrer was typically likened to such contemporaries as Allen Sherman and Stan Freberg for his comedian riffs on tradition and politics and he was cited by Randy Newman and “Weird Al” Jankovic amongst others as an affect.
He mocked the types of music he did not like (fashionable folks songs, rock ‘n’ roll and fashionable jazz), laughed at the specter of nuclear annihilation and denounced discrimination.
However he attacked in such an erudite, even well mannered, method that just about nobody objected.
“Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded,” musicologist Barry Hansen as soon as mentioned. Hansen co-produced the 2000 boxed set of Lehrer’s songs, “The Remains of Tom Lehrer,” and had featured Lehrer’s music for many years on his syndicated “Dr. Demento” radio present.
Lehrer’s physique of labor was truly fairly small, amounting to about three dozen songs.
“When I got a funny idea for a song, I wrote it. And if I didn’t, I didn’t,” Lehrer instructed The Related Press in 2000 throughout a uncommon interview. “I wasn’t like a real writer who would sit down and put a piece of paper in the typewriter. And when I quit writing, I just quit. … It wasn’t like I had writer’s block.”
He’d gotten into performing by accident when he started to compose songs within the early Nineteen Fifties to amuse his buddies. Quickly he was performing them at coffeehouses round Cambridge, Massachusetts, whereas he remained at Harvard to show and procure a grasp’s diploma in math.
He reduce his first file in 1953, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” which included “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” lampooning the attitudes of the Outdated South, and the “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” suggesting how a prissy Harvard blueblood would possibly sing a soccer combat tune.
After a two-year stint within the Military, Lehrer started to carry out concert events of his materials in venues all over the world. In 1959, he launched one other LP known as “More of Tom Lehrer” and a stay recording known as “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” nominated for a Grammy for finest comedy efficiency (musical) in 1960.
However across the similar time, he largely give up touring and returned to instructing math, although he did some writing and acting on the aspect.
Lehrer mentioned he was by no means comfy showing in public.
“I enjoyed it up to a point,” he instructed The AP in 2000. “But to me, going out and performing the concert every night when it was all available on record would be like a novelist going out and reading his novel every night.”
He did produce a political satire tune every week for the 1964 tv present “That Was the Week That Was,” a groundbreaking topical comedy present that anticipated “Saturday Night Live” a decade later.
He launched the songs the next yr in an album titled “That Was the Year That Was.” The material included “Who’s Subsequent?” that ponders which government will be the next to get the nuclear bomb … perhaps Alabama? (He didn’t need to tell his listeners that it was a bastion of segregation at the time.) “Air pollution” takes a take a look at the then-new idea that maybe rivers and lakes must be cleaned up.
He additionally wrote songs for the Seventies instructional kids’s present “The Electric Company.” He instructed AP in 2000 that listening to from individuals who had benefited from them gave him much more satisfaction than reward for any of his satirical works.
His songs had been revived within the 1980 musical revue “Tomfoolery” and he made a uncommon public look in London in 1998 at a celebration honoring that musical’s producer, Cameron Waterproof coat.
Lehrer was born in 1928, in New York Metropolis, the son of a profitable necktie designer. He recalled an idyllic childhood on Manhattan’s Higher West Facet that included attending Broadway reveals along with his household and strolling by Central Park day or evening.
After skipping two grades in class, he entered Harvard at 15 and, after receiving his grasp’s diploma, he spent a number of years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate.
“I spent many, many years satisfying all the requirements, as many years as possible, and I started on the thesis,” he as soon as mentioned. “But I just wanted to be a grad student, it’s a wonderful life. That’s what I wanted to be, and unfortunately, you can’t be a Ph.D. and a grad student at the same time.”
He started to show part-time at Santa Cruz within the Seventies, primarily to flee the cruel New England winters.
Sometimes, he acknowledged, a pupil would enroll in considered one of his lessons primarily based on data of his songs.
“But it’s a real math class,” he mentioned on the time. “I don’t do any funny theorems. So those people go away pretty quickly.”
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Former Related Press author John Rogers contributed to this story. Rogers retired from The AP in 2021.
