Yesterday I attended the memorial service for Dr. Edward R. Shipwright, who was a piano professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for 30 years. I got to know Ed when I was hired to teach organ at UHM way back in 1974, and I joined the other members of the keyboard faculty every semester to hear students play their juries (organ and piano exams)—the other piano faculty members included Whitney Thrall, Peter Coraggio, Ruth Pfeiffer and Beebe Freitas. Sadly, now only Whitney is still alive of this bunch. I listened to juries every semester until 1988 when the University decided not to have lecturers (such as myself) teach applied music.
It was during one of those fourteen years at UH that I was pregnant with my son and during my sixth month of pregnancy, I was asked to accompany a composition done by another faculty member. When I came out on stage in a red dress, everyone gasped, because I was so huge and looking to deliver the baby at any moment. Whenever I saw Ed, he remembered my pregnancy—however, he also got me mixed up with my predecessor, Barbara Adler, because apparently when SHE was pregnant, she listened to piano juries while lying on the floor.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Mark Russell, a piano teacher and parishioner at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu, asked me to type the program for Ed’s service, which I did with pleasure. You can see a PDF of the program by clicking here.
It was a lovely service, filled with lots of piano music—both recordings of Ed playing plus live, heartfelt performances by Jacqueline Reber and Carolyn Stanton. The only thing I was sorry about was that the mortuary only had a digital and not an acoustic piano on which to hear the live performances.
I saw a number of people I knew from the Lutheran Church of Honolulu, people from the piano group as described in the eulogy below. Ed occasionally came to our concerts and musical events at LCH and once he told he was baptized a Lutheran.
I asked Lynne Johnson for a copy of her brilliant eulogy and she graciously gave it to me, as seen below. Lynne was formerly a student of Ed’s, and now gives an informative, but always humorous, talk preceding each performance of the Hawaii Opera Theatre. She said she received much of the information about Ed from Whitney Thrall, who is now in his 90s, and sat in the front row.
We are here today to celebrate the life of a remarkable individual, Dr. Edward Shipwright. All of us here knew and loved Ed, and he touched each of our lives in significant ways.
Ed’s background is interesting. He was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 14, 1933. He was the youngest of three children, and as you know, he was precocious in many ways. He took to the piano at an early age, frustrating his older siblings by playing difficult pieces long before they could and accessing the keyboard at every opportunity. While his siblings had to be reminded to practice, Ed had to be reminded that he had to share the piano with others. He apparently began playing the organ at church at age five.
While he was still young, the family moved from Chicago to Osceola, Iowa, where the father ran a movie theater. It was a family affair, with his brother running the projector, his mother selling tickets, and little Ed selling popcorn. I remember Ed telling me how much he enjoyed the movie Cinema Paradiso, which brought back memories of his family’s movie house. Osceola is not a big town. The 2010 census showed about 5,000 people. I am not sure the schools there knew what to do with a student like Ed, who, besides being a major musical talent, liked to read everything he could get his hands on, including all of Shakespeare’s plays. And he loved opera, listening to it on the radio and on records and studying scores from the library. From age 5 or so, he would pick out the melodies from operas on the piano. He was basically self-taught as a musician but managed to do various gigues around town. There were a group of ladies who enjoyed taking him where he needed to go to perform and so he never learned to ride a bicycle.
He received a full scholarship to Drake University in Des Moines as a music major. I remember him telling me how delighted he was when he would be asked to give his own thoughts on an essay question. He said, “I had always had opinions on things, but it never occurred to me that someone might actually want to hear them.”
From Drake he went to Syracuse University in New York. After a year there, he moved to New York City, working in a bank as a teller until he was able to get into Juilliard, where, again, he received a full scholarship. His years there were satisfying and rich. He was one of the star piano students, and he also taught piano and various music courses for the preparatory school. He loved the culture of New York City, the opera, the theater, the exhibitions, the lectures, and the overall stimulating intellectual environment.
After he got his degree from Juilliard, he went on to Columbia for his doctorate. When he found out that the University of Hawaii was looking for piano faculty, he agreed to be interviewed for the job, having been told that interviewing was good practice. Then on a particularly cold night in February, when his pipes had frozen, Ed got a call from the University of Hawaii offering him the position. He said “I’ll take it.”
Ed came to UH in 1970, and it was a major culture shock. Things got easier when his friend Whitney Thrall arrived two years later, setting up his own piano studio.
Ed began at UH by teaching piano classes for undergraduate students. The classes were became more and more popular as students learned what a fabulous teacher Ed was. He eventually became head of the piano faculty. I was one of his hundreds of students. For me, he opened up the depth, beauty, and complexity of music in such an inspiring way, that I ended up leaving my job as a development officer and going to UH to get a degree in musicology, a musical degree where piano talent was not required. I never stopped taking lessons, and I never stopped being inspired by Ed as my teacher.
For most of his time at UH Ed put on a full piano recital every year. His talent caught the attention of Janos Gereben, a critic from the Star Bulletin, who would write glowing reviews of his performances.
Indeed I did lie on the floor for about one hour of juries. I had broken my foot, which led to low back pain all during the pregnancy. Ed and Beebe got a big kick out of that, but I wouldn’t have made it if I’d had to sit for hours! How funny to hear about this today when that “baby” is now 44 years old!
Dear Ms. Crosier,
You and Ed Shipwright’s friends in Hawai’i have never heard of me. Today’s mail brought the Juilliard alumni journal, which an old friend of mine subscribed me to a few years ago, and I read the news of Mr. Shipwright’s death. At age 85, I should not have been surprised, but it is still sad news.
I studied music theory with Mr. Shipwright at Juilliard Prep, now called the Pre-College, in 1967-1968. I was a piano student, but unfortunately he was not my major teacher; my loss, as my own teacher, who shall go nameless here, was a horror. I was a good theory student, but for decades I hadn’t thought about him at all. Instead of going into music — I was also a violist, and played professionally at one point for about 4 years — I chose a different path, attending a liberal arts college, medical school, residency in neurology with three fellowships, becoming an academic physician, then joining the US Army Medical Corps and retiring in 2013 as a full colonel and one of the country’s few experts on the medical response to chemical weapons. But I also became a composer, and when I realized that in 2013 I would become fully eligible for the GI Bill, I decided to follow my first instinct, finally, pension in hand, and applied for master’s programs in composition. I rejoice to say that I actually carried that out, went to CCM in Cincinnati, earned my MM degree in 2015, and am now something of a free-lance composer. And that’s where Mr. Shipwright comes back into the story.
When I applied to graduate school five years ago — at the age of 59, no less — I found that I needed to have an answer for the inevitable question, “How much music theory have you had?” Having never studied music at all at the undergraduate level, but having had my Pre-College courses back in the 1960’s and 30+ years of chamber music coaching at the Bennington summer conference, it was hard to answer. I remembered who Mr. Shipwright had been, and somehow retrieved from deep mental storage the fact that he had taught at the University of Hawai’i, although, by then, he had long since retired. The bottom line is that I found him online and we had a delightful conversation, during which I asked Mr. Shipwright my question. “Oh, what was the highest level you had at Juilliard?” Mr. Shipwright asked. I replied Theory 7. “How far did we get?” “German, French, and Italian augmented sixths,” I replied, somewhat amazed that I could remember this at all. “Well,” said Mr. Shipwright, “standards have slipped since your day, I’m afraid. That’s second-year theory now. Tell them you’ve had a year of college music theory and you will certainly be honest.” I thanked him, I placed out of all my requirements, and the rest, as they say, is very recent history.
I’m delighted to have had a teacher from whom I learned things that I could remember 45 years later!
Respectfully,
Jonathan Newmark, M.D., M.M.
COL (ret.), MC, USA
Burke, Virginia
Cell 513 2676137