Ulysses Kay

Ulysses Simpson Kay was born on the seventh of January 1917 in Tucson, Arizona, the son of Ulysses Simpson Kay Sr., a barber who had once been a cowboy and jockey in Texas, and Elizabeth Davis Kay, a gifted amateur pianist. Through his mother — the niece of the New Orleans cornetist and bandleader Joseph "King" Oliver, whom young Ulysses knew as "Uncle Joe" — music ran deep in the household. It was Oliver himself who counseled the boy toward the piano, telling him to learn his craft first and let his own path in music reveal itself in time.

Kay studied piano, violin, and saxophone, and at the University of Arizona he was encouraged toward composition by the pioneering African American composer William Grant Still. He pursued graduate study at the Eastman School of Music under Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers, worked with Paul Hindemith at Tanglewood and Yale, and, after service in the United States Navy during the Second World War, studied at Columbia University with Otto Luening.

His was a voice of clarity and craftsmanship, largely neoclassical in temper, spanning orchestral works, opera, choral music, and film scores. In 1958 he was chosen as one of four American composers sent on a United States State Department cultural-exchange tour of the Soviet Union — a rare honor of musical diplomacy. In 1968 he joined Lehman College of the City University of New York, where he was named Distinguished Professor and taught for two decades until his retirement in 1988.

Ulysses Kay died on the twentieth of May 1995 in Englewood, New Jersey, leaving a catalogue of enduring dignity and quiet power. May the honored name of Ulysses Kay resound wherever his music is heard.